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TECHNICS AND
CIVILIZATION

BY LEWIS MUMFORD

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

NEW YORK

[h*5*44]

This book is complete and unabridged.
It is manufactured in conformity with gov-
ernment regulations for saving paper, j

Typography by Robert Josepky
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The first draft of this book was written in 1930 and
the second was completed in 1931. Up to 1932 my
purpose was to deal with the machine, the city, the
region, the group, and the personality within a single
volume. In working out the section on technics it was
necessary to increase the scale of the whole project:
so the present book covers only a limited area of the
first draft. While Technics and Civilization is a unit,
certain aspects of the machine, such as its relation to
architecture, and certain aspects of civilization that
may ultimately bear upon the course of technics re-
main to be treated at another time. L. M.

CONTENTS

OBJECTIVES 3

CHAPTER I. CLXTURAL PREPARATION 9

1 : Machines, Utilities, and ^The Machine” 9

2 : The Monastery and the Clock 12

3: Space, Distance, Movement 18

4; The Influence of Capitalism 23

5: From Fable to Fact 28

6: The Obstacle of Animism 31

7: The Road Through Magic 36

8: Social Regimentation 41

9 : The Mechanical Universe 45

10: The Duty to Invent 52

11: Practical Anticipations 55

CHAPTER IL AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 60

] : The Profile of Technics 60

2: De Re Metalliea 65

3: Mining and Modern Capitalism 74

4: Tlie Primitive Engineer *77

5: From Game-Hunt to Man-Hunt 81

6: Warfare and Invention 85

7: Military Mass-Production 89

8: Drill and Deterioration 94

9 : Mars and Venus 96

10: Consumptive Pull and Productive Drive 102

vii

CONTENTS

viii

CHAPTER III. THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 107

1: Technical Syncretism 107

2: The Technological Complex 109

3: New Sources of Power

4: Trunk, Plank, and Spar 1^9

5: Through a Glass, Brightly 1^4

6: Glass and the Ego

7: The Primary Inventions 131

8: Weakness and Strength

CHAPTER IV. THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 151

1: England’s Belated Leadership 151

2: The New Barbarism 153

3: Carboniferous Capitalism 156

4: The Steam Engine 158

5: Blood and Iron 163

6: The Destruction of Environment 167

7: The Degradation of the Worker 172

8: The Starvation of Life 178

9: The Doctrine of Progress 182

10: The Struggle for Existence 1B5

11: Class and Nation 187

12: The Empire of Muddle 191

13: Power and Time 196

14: The Esthetic Compensation 199

15: Mechanical Triumphs 205

16: The Paleotechnic Passage 210

CHAPTER V. THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 212

1: The Beginnings of Neotechnics 212

2: The Importance of Science 215

3: New Sources of Energy 221

4: The Displacement of the Proletariat 224

5: Neotechnic Materials 229

CONTENTS

6: Power and Mobility 235

7: The Paradox of Communication 239

8: The New" Permanent Record 242

9: Light and Life 245

10: The Influence of Biology 250

II: From Destruction to Conservation 255

12: The ITanning of Population 260

13: The Prtt.sent Pseudomorph 263

CHAPTER VL COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 268

1 ; Summary of Social Reactions 268

2: The Mechanical Routine 269

3: Purposeless ]Materialism: Superfluous Power 273

4; Co-optu'ation versus Slavery 278

5: Direcl Attack on tlie Machine 284

6: R<nnantic and Utilitarian 285

7: The Cult of the Past 288

8: Tht* Return to Nature 295

9: Organic? and Meehanieal Polarities 299

10: Sport and the ‘'Bitch-goddess’^ 303

11: The Cult of Death 307

12: The Minor Shock-Absorbers 311

13: Resistanc‘e and Adjustment 316

CHAPTER VIL ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 321

1 : New Cultural Values 321

2: The Neutrality of Order 326

3: The Estlielic Experienc'e of the Machine 333

4: Photography as Means and Symbol 337

5: The Growth of Functionalism 344

6: The Simplification of the Environment 357

7: The Objective Personality 359

CHAPTER VIII* ORIENTATION 364

1 : The Dissolution of ‘The Machine” 364

2: Toward an Organic Ideology 368

CONTENTS

3: The Elements of Social Energetics 373

4: Increase Conversion! 380

5: Economize Production! 383

6: Normalize Consumption! 390

7: Basic Communism 400

8: Socialize Creation! 406

9: Work for Automaton and Amateur 410

10: Political Control 417

11: The Diminution of the Machine 423

12: Toward a Dynamic Equilibrium 429

13: Summary and Prospect 433

PREFATORY NOTE v

INVENTIONS 437

BIBLIOGRAPHY 44.7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 475

INDEX 477

ILLUSTRATIONS

I. ANTICIPATIONS OF SPEED 52

II. PERSPECTIVES 53

III. THE DANCE OF DEATH 84

IV. MINING, MUNITIONS, AND WAR 85

V. TECHNICS OF WOOD 148

VL EOTECHNTC ENVIRONMENT 149

VIE EARLY MANUFACTURE 180

VIII. PALEOTECH.NTC PRODUCTS 181

IX. PALEOTECHNIC TRIUMPHS 244

X. NEOTECHNIC AUTOMATISM 276

XI. AIRPLANE SHAPES 277

XII. NATURE AND THE MACHINE 340

XIII. ESTHETIC ASSIMILATION 341

XIV. MODERN MACHINE ART 372

XV. THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 373

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

OBJECTIVES

During the lapt thousand years the material basis and the cultural
forms of Western Civilization have been profoundly modified by
the development of the machine. How did this come about? Where did
it take place? What were the chief motives that encouraged this
radical transformation of the environment and the routine of life:
what were the (aids in view: what were the means and methods: what
unexpe(‘ted values have arisen in the process? These are some of
the ({uestions that the present study seeks to answer.

While people often call our period the “Machine Age,” very few
have any perspective on modern technics or any clear notion as to its
origins. Popular historians usually date the great transformation in
modem industry from Watt’s supposed invention of the steam
engine; and in the conventional economics textbook the application
of automatic machinery to spinning and weaving is often treated as
an equally critical turning point. But the fact is that in Western
Europe the machine had been developing steadily for at least seven
centuries before the dramatic changes that accompanied the “indus-
trial revolution” took place. Men had become mechanical before
they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and
interest; and the will-to-order had appeared once more in tlie monas-
tery and the army and the counting-house before it finally manifested
itself in the factory. Behind all the great material inventions of the
last century and a half was not merely a long internal development
of technics: there was also a change of mind. Before the new indus-
trial processes could take hold on a great scale, a reorientation of

wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary.

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
To understand the dominating role played by technics in modern
civilization, one must explore in detail the preliminary period of
ideological and social preparation. Not merely must one explain the
existence of the new mechanical instruments: one must explain the
culture that was ready to use them and profit by them so extensively.
For note this: mechanization and regimentation are not new phe-
nomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have
been projected and embodied in organized forms which dominate
every aspect of our existence. Other civilizations reached a high
degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly
influenced by the methods and aims of technics. AH the critical
instruments of modern technology — the clock, the printing press,
the water-miU, the magnetic compass, the loom, the lathe, gunpowder,
paper, to say nothing of mathematics and chemistry and mechanics —
existed in other cultures. The Chinese, tire Arabs, the Greeks, long
before the Northern European, had taken most of the first steps
toward the machine. And although the great engineering works of
the Cretans, the Egyptians, and the Romans were carried out mainly
on an empirical basis, these peoples plainly had an alniniiance of
technical skill at their command. They had machines; but they did
not develop “the machine.” It remained for the peoples of Western
Europe to carry the physical sciences and the exact arts to a point
no other culture had reached, and to adapt the whole mode of life
to the pace and the capacities of the machine. How did this happen?
How in fact could the machine take possession of European society
until that society had, by an inner accommodation, surrendered
to the machine?

Plainly, what is usually called the industrial revolution, the series
of industrial changes that began in the eighteenth century, was a
transformation that took place in the course of a much longer march.

The machine has swept over our civilization in three successive
waves. The first wave, which was set in motion around the tenth
century, gathered strength and momentum as other institutions in
civilization were weakening and dispersing: tliis early triumph of
the machine was an effort to achieve order and power by purely
external means, and its success was partly due to the fact that it

OBJECTIVES S

evaded many of the real issues of life and turned away from the
momentous moral and social difficulties that it had neither con-
fronted nor solved. The second wave heaved upward in the eighteenth
century after a long steady roll through tlie Middle Ages, with its
improvements in mining and iron-working; accepting all the ideologi-
cal premises of the first effort to create the machine, the disciples
of ^’^att and Arkwright sought to universalize them and take advan-
tage of the practical consequences. In the course of this effort, various
moral and social and political problems which had been set to one
side by the e.xclu.sive development of the machine, now returned
with doubled urgency: the very efficiency of the machine was drasti-
cally curtailed by the failure to achieve in society a set of harmonious
and integrated purposes. External regimentation and internal re-
si.stance and disintegration went hand in hand: those fortunate
members of society who were in complete harmony with tlie machine
achieved tliat state only by closing up various important avenues of
life. Finally, we begin in our owm day to observe the swelling
energies of a third wave: behind this wave, both in technics and in
civilization, are forces which were suppressed or perverted by the
earlier development of the machine, forces which now manifest them-
selves in every department of activity, and which tend toward a new
synthesis in thought and a fresh synergy in action. As the result of
this third movement, the machine ceases to be a substitute for God or
for an orderly society; and instead of its success being measured by
the mechanization of life, its worth becomes more and more meas-
urable in terms of its own approach to the organic and the living.
The receding waves of the first two phases of the machine diminish
a little the force of the third wave: but the image remains accurate
to the extent that it suggests that the wave with which we are now being
carried forward is moving in a direction opposite to those of the past.

By now’, it is plain, a new world has come into existence; but it
exists only in fragments. New forms of living have for long been in
process; but so far they have likewise been divided and unfocussed:
indeed, our vast gains in energy and in the production of goods have ,
manifested themselves in part in a loss of form and an impoverish-
ment of life. What has limited the beneficence of the machine? Under

6 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

what conditions may the machine be directed toward a fuller use
and accomplishment? To these questions, too, tlie present study seeks
an answer. Technics and civilization as a whole are the result of
human choices and aptitudes and strivings, deliberate as well as
unconscious, often irrational when apparently they are most objective
and scientific: but even when they are uncontrollable they are not
external. Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and
moment-to-moment decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles;
and he who does not see choice in the development of the machine
merely betrays his incapacity to observe cumulative effects until they
are bunched together so closely that they seem completely external
and impersonal. No matter how completely technics relies upon the
objective procedures of the sciences, it does not form an independent
system, like the universe: it exists as an element in human culture
and it promises well or ill as the social groups that exploit it promise
well or ill. The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no
promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps
promises. In order to reconquer the machine and subdue it to human
purposes, one must first understand it and assimilate it. So far, we
have embraced the machine without fully understanding it, or, like
the weaker romantics, we have rejected the machine without first
seeing how much of it we could intelligently assimilate.

The machine itself, however, is a product of human ingenuity and
effort: hence to understand the machine is not merely a first step
toward re-orienting our civilization: it is also a means toward under-
standing society and toward knowing ourselves. The world of technics
is not isolated and self-contained: it reacts to forces and impulses
that come from apparently remote parts of the esivironment. That
fact makes peculiarly hopeful the development that has been go-
ing on within the domain of technics itself since around 1870 : for
the organic has become visible again even witliin the mechanical
complex: some of our most characteristic mechanical instruments —
the telephone, the phonograph, the motion picture — ^have grown out
of our interest in the human voice and the human eye and our
knowledge of their physiology and anatomy. Can one detect, perhaps,
the characteristic properties of this emergent order — its pattern, its

OBJECTIVES

planes, its angle of polarization, its color? Can one, in the process
of crystallization, remove the turbid residues left behind by our earlier
forms of technology? Can one distinguish and define the specific
properties of a technics directed toward the service of life: properties
that distinguish it morally, socially, politically, esthetically from
the cruder forms that preceded it? Let us make the attempt. The
study of the rise and development of modern technics is a basis for
understanding and strengthening this contemporary transvaluation:
and the transvalualion of the machine is the next move, perhaps,
toward its mastery.

CHAPTER I.

CULTURAL PREPARATION

1; Machines, Utilities, and “The Machine”

During the last century the automatic or semi-automatic machine
has come to occupy a large place in our daily routine; and we have
tended to attribute to tlie physical instrument itself the whole com-
plex of habits and methods that created it and accompanied it.
Almost every discussion of technology from Marx onward has
tended to overemphasize the part played by the more mobile and
active parts of our industrial equipment, and has slighted other
equally critical elements in our technical heritage.

What is a machine? Apart from the simple machines of classic
mechanics, the inclined plane, the pulley, and so forth, the subject
remains a cotjfused one. Many of the writers who have discussed
the machine age have treated the machine as if it were a very recent
phenomenon, and as if the technology of handicraft had employed
only tools to transform the environment. These preconceptions are
basele.ss. For the last three thousand years, at least, machines have
been an essential part of our older technical heritage. Reuleaux’s
definition of a machine has remained a classic: “A machine is a com-
bination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the
mechanical forces of nature can he compelled to do work accom-
panied by certain determinant motions”; but it does not take us
very far. Its place is due to his importance as the first great
morphologist of machines, for it leaves out the large class of ma-
chines operated by man-power.

Machines have developed out of a complex of non-organic agents
for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the me-

10 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

chanical or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing
to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of life. The
automaton is the last step in a process that began with the use of
one part or another of the human body as a tool. In back of the
development of tools and machines lies the attempt to modify the
environment in such a way as to fortify and sustain the human
organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise
unarmed organism, or to manufacture outside of the body a set of
conditions more favorable toward maintaining its equilibrium and
ensuring its survival. Instead of a physiological adaptation to the
cold, like the growth of hair or the habit of hibernation, there is an
environmental adaptation, such as that made possible by the use of
clothes and the erection of shelters.

The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the
degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive
power of the operator: the tool lends itself to manipulation, the
machine to automatic action. The degree of complexity is unimpor-
tant; for, using the tool, the human hand and eye perform compli-
cated actions which are the equivalent, in function, of a well de-
veloped machine; while, on the other hand, there are highly effec-
tive machines, like the drop hammer, which do very simple tasks,
with the aid of a relatively simple mechanism. The difference be-
tween tools and machines lies primarily in the degree of automatism
they have reached: the skilled tool-user becomes more accurate and
more automatic, in short, more mechanical, as his originally volun-
tary motions settle down into reflexes, and on the other hand, even
in the most completely automatic machine, there must intervene some-
where, at the beginning and the end of the process, first in the original
design, and finally in the ability to overcome defects and to make
repairs, the conscious participation of a human agent.

Moreover, between the tool and the machine there stands another
class of objects, the machine-tool: here, in the lathe or the drill, one
has the accuracy of the finest machine coupled with the skilled at-
tendance of the workman. When one adds to this mechanical complex
an external source of power, the line of division becomes even more
difficult to establish. In general, the machine emphasizes specializa-

CULTURAL PREPARATION

tion of function, whereas the tool indicates flexibility: a planing
machine performs only one operation, whereas a knife can be used
to smooth wood, to carve it, to split it, or to pry open a lock, or to
drive in a screw. The automatic machine, then, is a very specialized
kind of adaptation; it involves the notion of an external source of
power, a more or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and a
limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine was a sort
of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions.

Along with these dynamic elements in technology there is another
set, more static in character, but equally important in function.
While the growth of machines is the most patent technical fact of
the last thousand years, the machine, in the form of the fire-drill or
the potter’s wheel, has been in existence since at least neolithic limes.
During the earlier period, some of the most efilective adaptations of
the environment came, not from the invention of machines, but from
the equally admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities.
The basket and the pot stand for the first, the dye vat and the brick-
kiln stand for the second, and reservoirs and aqueducts and roads
and buildings belong to the third class. The modern period has finally
given us the power utility, like the railroad track or the electric
transmission line, which functions only through the operation of
power machinery. Wliile tools and machines transform the environ-
ment by changing the shape and location of objects, utensils and
apparatus have been used to effect equally necessary chemical trans-
formations. Tanning, brewing, distilling, dyeing have been as impor-
tant in man’s technical development as smithing or weaving. But
most of these processes remained in their traditional state till the
middle of the nineteenth century, and it is only since then that they
have been influenced in any large degree by the same set of scientific
forces and human interests that were developing the modern power-
machine.

In the series of objects from utensils to utilities tliere is the same
relation between the workman and the process that one notes in the
series between tools and automatic machines: differences in the*
degree of specialization, the degree of impersonality. But since
people’s attention is directed most easily to the noisier and more

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

active parts of the environment, the role of the utility and the appa-
ratus has been neglected in most discussions of the machine, or,
what is almost as bad, these technical instruments have all been
clumsily grouped as machines. The point to remember is that both
have played an enormous part in the development of the modern
environment; and at no stage in history can the two means of adapta-
tion be split apart. Every technological complex includes both: not
least our modern one.

When I use the word machines hereafter I shall refer to specific
objects like the printing press or the power loom. When I use the
term “the machine” I shall employ it as a shortliand reference to
the entire technological complex. This will embrace the knowledge
and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the new
technics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus
and utility as well as machines proper.

2: The Monastery and the Clock

Where did the machine first take form in modern civilization?
There was plainly more than one point of origin. Our mechanical
civilization represents the convergence of numerous habits, ideas,
and modes of living, as well as technical instruments; and some
of these were, in the beginning, directly opposed to the civilization
they helped to create. But the first manifestation of the new order
took place in the general picture of the world: during the first seven
centuries of the machine’s existence the categories of time and space
underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect of life was left
untouched by this transformation. The application of quantitative
methods of thought to the study of nature had its first manifestation
in the regular measurement of time; and the new mechanical con-
ception of time arose in part out of the routine of the monastery.
Alfred Whitehead has emphasized the importance of the scholastic
belief in a universe ordered by God as one of the foundations of
modem physics: but behind that belief was the presence of order in
the institutions of the Church itself.

The technics of the ancient world were still carried on from
Constantinople and Baghdad to Sicily and Cordova: hence the early

CULTURAL PREPARATION 13

lead taken by Salerno in the scientific and medical advances of the
Middle Age. It was, however, in the monasteries of the West that
the desire for order and power, other than that expressed in the mili-
tary domination of weaker men, first manifested itself after the long
uncertainty and bloody confusion that attended the breakdown of the
Roman Empire. Within the walls of the monastery was sanctuary;
under the rule of the order surprise and doubt and caprice and
irregularity were put at bay. Opposed to the erratic fluctuations and
pulsations of the worldly life was the iron discipline of the rule.
Benedict added a seventh period to the devotions of the day, and in
the seventh century, by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed
that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty-four
hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the canoni-
cal hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring
their regular repetition became necessary.

According to a now discredited legend, the first modern mechani-
cal clock, worked by falling weights, was invented by the monk
named Gerbert who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II near the
close of the tenth century. This clock was probably only a water
clock, one of those bequests of the ancient world either left over
directly from the days of tlie Romans, like the water-wheel itself, or
coming back again into the West through the Arabs. But the legend,
as so often happens, is accurate in its implications if not in its facts.
The monastery was the seat of a regular life, and an instrument for
striking the hours at intervals or for reminding the bell-ringer that it
was time to strike the bells, was an almost inevitable product of this
life. If the mechanical clock did not appear until the cities of the
thirteenth century demanded an orderly routine, the habit of order
itself and the earnest regulation of time-sequences had become almost
second nature in the monastery. Coulton agrees with Sombart in
looking upon the Benedictines, the great working order, as perhaps
the original founders of modern capitalism: their rule certainly took
the curse off work and their vigorous engineering enterprises may
even have robbed warfare of some of its glamor. So one is not strain-
ing the facts when one suggests that the monasteries — at one time
there were 40,000 under the Benedictine rule — Whelped to give human

14 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for
the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of
synchronizing the actions of men.

Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for
the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions
that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of
men’s minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to
good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. At
all events, by the thirteenth century there are definite records of
mechanical clocks, and by 1370 a well-designed “modem” clock had
been built by Heinrich von Wyck at Paris. Meanwhile, bell towers
had come into existence, and the new clocks, if they did not have,
till the fourteenth century, a dial and a hand that translated the
movement of time into a movement through space, at all events
struck the hours. The clouds that could paralyze the sundial, the
freezing that could stop the water clock on a winter night, were
no longer obstacles to time-keeping: summer or winter, day or night,
one was aware of the measured clank of the clock. The instrument
presently spread outside the monastery; and the regular striking of
the hells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman and
the merchant. The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban
existence. Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting
and time-rationing. As this took place. Eternity ceased gradually to
serve as the measure and focus of human actions.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern
industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both
the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even
today no other machine is so ubiquitous. Here, at the very beginning
of modem technics, appeared prophetically the accurate automatic
machine which, only after centuries of further effort, was also to
prove the final consummation of this technics in every department
of industrial activity. There had been power-machines, such as the
water-mill, before the clock; and there had also been various kinds
of automata, to awaken the wonder of the populace in the temple,
or to please the idle fancy of some Moslem caliph: machines one
finds illustrated in Hero and Al-Jazari. But here was a new kind of

CULTURAL PREPARATION 15

power-machine, in which the source of power and the transmission
were of such a nature as to ensure the even flow of energy throughout
the works and to make possible regular production and a stand-
ardized product. In its relationship to determinable quantities of
energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its
own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the fore-
most machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained
in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines
aspire. The clock, moreover, served as a model for many other kinds
of mechanical works, and the analysis of motion that accompanied
the perfection of the clock, with the various types of gearing and
transmission that were elaborated, contributed to the success of
quite different kinds of machine. Smiths could have hammered thou-
sands of suits of armor or thousands of iron carmon, wheelwrights
could have shaped thousands of great water-wheels or crude gears,
without inventing any of the special types of movement developed
in clockwork, and without any of the accuracy of measurement and
fineness of articulation that finally produced the accurate eighteenth
century chronometer.

The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose “prod-
uct” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated
time from human events and helped create the belief in an inde-
pendent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special
w'orld of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief
in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of
uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and
night steadily change, but a slight journey from East to West alters
astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of
the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign:
while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the
breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood
and action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not
by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. The shepherd meas-
ures from the time the ewes lambed; the farmer measures back to
the day of sowing or forward to the harvest: if growth has its own
duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion

16 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical
time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants,
organic time — ^what Bergson calls duration — is cumulative in its
effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense, be speeded up or
run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images of a moving
picture, organic time moves in only one direction — ^through the
cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death — and the
past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still
to be born.

Around 1345, according to Thorndike, the division of hours into
sixty minutes and of minutes into sixty seconds became common: it
was this abstract framework of divided time that became more and
more the point of reference for both action and thought, and in the
effort to arrive at accuracy in this department, the astronomical
exploration of the sky focussed attention further upon the regular,
implacable movements of the heavenly bodies through space. Early
in the sixteenth century a young Nuremberg mechanic, Peter Henlein,
is supposed to have created “many-wheeled watches out of small bits
of iron” and by the end of the century the small domestic clock had
been introduced in England and Holland. As with the motor car and
the airplane, the richer classes first took over the new mechanism
and popularized it: partly because they alone could afford it, partly
because the new bourgeoisie were the first to discover that, as Frank-
lin later put it, “time is money.” To become “as regular as clock-
work” was the bourgeois ideal, and to own a watch was for long a
definite symbol of success. The increasing tempo of civilization led
to a demand for greater power: and in turn power quickened the
tempo.

Now, the orderly punctual life that first took shape in the monas-
teries is not native to mankind, although by now Western peoples
are so thoroughly regimented by the clock that it is “second nature”
and they look upon its observance as a fact of nature. Many Eastern
civilizations have flourished on a loose basis in time: the Hindus
have in fact been so indifferent to time that they lack even an
authentic chronology of the years. Only yesterday, in the midst of
the industrializations of Soviet Russia, did a society come into exist-

CULTURAL PREPARATION

ence to further the carrying of watches there and to propagandize
the benefits of punctuality. The popularization of time-keeping, which
followed the production of the cheap standardized watch, first in
Geneva, then in America around the middle of the last century, was
essential to a well-articulated system of transportation and production.

To keep lime was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave indus-
trial value to the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of the
sailors tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical clock is
more pervasive and strict: it presides over the day from the hour of
rising to the hour of rest. When one thinks of the day as an abstract
span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s
night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps,
so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of
time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours,
minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come
into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it
could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded
by the invention of labor-saving instruments.

Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic func-
tions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling
hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one
was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it. A generalized time-
consciousness accompanied the wider use of clocks: dissociating time
from organic sequences, it became easier for the men of the
Renascence to indulge the fantasy of reviving tlie classic past or
of reliving the splendors of antique Roman civilization: the cult
of history, appearing first in daily ritual, finally abstracted itself as
a special discipline. In the seventeenth century journalism and pe-
riodic literature made their appearance: even in dress, following
the lead of Venice as fashion-center, people altered styles every
year rather than every generation.

The gain in mechanical efficiency through co-ordination and
through the closer articulation of the day’s events cannot be over-
estimated: while this increase cannot be measured in mere horse-
power, one has only to imagine its absence today to foresee the
speedy disruption and eventual collapse of our entire society. The

18 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

modem industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam

easier than it could do without the clock.

3; Space, Distance, Movement

“A child and an adult, an Australian primitive and a European,
a man of the Middle Ages and a contemporary, are distinguished
not only by a difference in degree, but by a difference in kind by their
methods of pictorial representation.”

Dagobert Frey, whose words I have just quoted, has made a pene-
trating study of the difference in spatial conceptions between the early
Middle Ages and the Renascence: he has re-enforced by a wealth
of specific detail, the generalization that no two cultures live concep-
tually in the same kind of time and space. Space and time, like
language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condi-
tion and direct practical action. Long before Kant announced that
time and space were categories of the mind, long before the mathema-
ticians discovered that there were conceivable and rational forms of
space other than the form described by Euclid, mankind at large
had acted on this premise. Like the Englishman in France who thought
that bread was the right name for le pain each culture believes that
■every other kind of space and time is an approximation to or a per-
version of the real space and time in which it lives.

During the Middle Ages spatial relations tended to be organized
as symbols and values. The highest object in the city was the church
spire which pointed toward heaven and dominated all the lesser
buildings, as the church dominated their hopes and fears. Space was
divided arbitrarily to represent the seven virtues or the twelve
apostles or the ten commandments or the trinity. Without constant
symbolic reference to the fables and myths of Christianity the ra-
tionale of medieval space would collapse. Even the most rational
minds were not exempt: Roger Bacon was a careful student of optics,
but after he had described the seven coverings of the eye he added
that by such means God had willed to express in our bodies an image
of the seven gifts of the spirit.

Size signified importance: to represent human beings of entirely
different sizes on the same plane of vision and at the same distance

CULTURAL PREPARATION

from the observer was entirely possible for the medieval artist. This
same habit applies not only to the representation of real objects but
to the organization of terrestrial experience by means of the map.
In medieval cartography the water and the land masses of the earth,
even when approximately known, may be represented in an arbitrary
figure like a tree, with no regard for the actual relations as experi-
enced by a traveller, and with no interest in anything except the
allegorical correspondence.

One further characteristic of medieval space must he noted : space
and time form two relatively independent systems. First : the medieval
artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as when
he projected the events of Christ’s life within a contemporary Italian
city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of time has made
a difference, just as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and
Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a
medieval chronicler mentions the King, as the author of The Wander-
ing Scholars remarks, it is sometimes a little difficult to find out
whether he is talking about Caesar or Alexander the Great or his
own monarch: each is equally near to him. Indeed, the word anach-
ronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art: it is only
when one related events to a co-ordinated frame of time and space
that being out of time or being untrue to time became disconcerting.
Similarly, in Botticelli’s The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three
different times are presented upon a single stage.

Because of this separation of time and space, things could appear
and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: tlie dropping of a ship below
the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a
demon down the chimney. There was no mystery about the past from
which they had emerged, no speculation as to the future toward
which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it
with something of the same mystery in which the coming and going
of adults affects the experience of young children, whose first graphic
efforts so much resemble in their organization the world of the
medieval artist. In this symbolic world of space and time every-
thing was either a mystery or a miracle. The connecting link between

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

events was the cosmic and religious order: the true order of space
was Heaven, even as the true order of time was Eternity.

Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century a revolu-
tionary change in the conception of space took place in Western
Europe. Space as a hierarchy of values was replaced by space as a
system of magnitudes. One of the indications of this new orientation
was the closer study of the relations of objects in space and the
discovery of the laws of perspective and the systematic organization
of pictures within the new frame fixed by the foreground, the
horizon and the vanishing point. Perspective turned the symbolic
relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became
a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant
not human or divine importance, but distance. Bodies did not exist
separately as absolute magnitudes: they were co-ordinated with
other bodies within the same frame of vision and must be in scale.
To achieve this scale, there must be an accurate representation of
the object itself, a point for point correspondence betweezi the picture
and the image: hence a fresh interest in external nature and in ques-
tions of fact. The division of the canvas into squares and the accurate
observation of the world through this abstract checkerboard marked
the new technique of the painter, from Paolo Ucello onward.

The new interest in perspective brought depth into tlie picture
and distance into the mind. In the older pictures, one’s eye jumped
from one part to another, picking up symbolic crumbs as taste and
fancy dictated: in the new pictures, one’s eye followed the lines of
linear perspective along streets, buildings, tessellated pavements
whose parallel lines the painter purposely introduced in order to
make the eye itself travel. Even the objects in the foreground were
sometimes grotesquely placed and foreshortened in order to create
the same illusion. Movement became a new source of value: move-
ment for its own sake. The measured space of the picture re-enforced
the measured time of the clock.

Within this new ideal network of space and time all events now
took place; and the most satisfactory event within this system was
uniform motion in ^ straight line, for such motion lent itself
to accurate representation within the system of spatial and temporal

CULTURAL PREPARATION

co-ordinates. One further consequence of this spatial order must he
noted:- to place a thing and to time it became essential to one’s
understanding of it. In Renascence space, the existence of objects
must be accounted for: their passage through time and space is a
clue to their appearance at any particular moment in any particular
place. The unknown is therefore no less determinate than tlie known:
given the roundness of the globe, the position of the Indies could be
assumed and the time-distance calculated. The very existence of such
an order was an incentive to explore it and to fill up the parts
that were unknown.

What the painters demonstrated in their application of perspec-
tive, the cartographers established in the same century in their new
maps. The Hereford Map of 1314 might have been done by a child:
it was practically wortliless for navigation. That of Ucello’s con-
temporary, Andrea Banco, 1436, was conceived on rational lines,
and represented a gain in conception as well as in practical accuracy.
By laying down the invisible lines of latitude and longitude, tire
cartographers paved the way for later explorers, like Columbus: as
with the later scientific method, the abstract system gave rational
expectations, even if on the basis of inaccurate knowledge. No
longer was it necessary for the navigator to hug the shore line: he
could launch out into the unknown, set his course toward an arbitrary
point, and return approximately to the place of departure. Both
Eden and Heaven were outside the new space; and though they
lingered on as the ostensible subjects of painting, the real subjects
were Time and Space and Nature and Man.

Presently, on the basis laid down by the painter and the cartog-
rapher, an interest in space as such, in movement as such, in loco-
motion as such, arose. In back of this interest were of course more
concrete alterations: roads had become more secure, vessels were
being built more soundly, above all, new inventions — ^the magnetic
needle, the astrolabe, the rudder — ^had made it possible to chart and
to hold a more accurate course at sea. The gold of the Indies and
the fabled fountains of youth and the happy isles of endless sensual
delight doubtless beckoned too: but the presence of these tangible

22 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

goals does not lessen the importance of the new schemata. The cate-
gories of time and space, once practically dissociated, had become
united: and the abstractions of measured time and measured space
undermined the earlier conceptions of infinity and eternity, since
measurement must begin with an arbitrary here and now even if
space and time be empty. The itch to use space and time had broken
out: and once they were co-ordinated wdlh movement, they could
be contracted or expanded: the conquest of space and time had
begun. (It is interesting, however, to note that lire very concept of
acceleration, which is part of our daily mechanical experience, was
not formulated till the seventeenth century. )

The signs of tliis conquest are many: they came forth in rapid
succession. In military arts the cross-bow and the ballista were re-
vived and extended, and on tlreir heels came more powerful weapons
for annihilating distance — the cannon and later the musket. Leonardo
conceived an airplane and built one. Fantastic projects for flight were
canvassed. In 1420 Fontana described a velocipede: in 1589 Gilles
de Bom of Antwerp apparently built a man-propelled wmgon: restless
preludes to the vast efforts and initiatives of the nineteenth century.
As with so many elements in our culture, the original impulse wuis
imparted to this movement by the Arabs: as early as 880 Abu
1-Qasim had attempted flight, and in 1065 Oliver of Malmesbury
had killed himself in an attempt to soar from a high place: but from
the fifteenth century on the desire to conquer the air became a
recurrent preoccupation of inventive minds; and it w'as close enough
to popular thought to make the report of a flight from Portugal to
Vienna serve as a news hoax in 1709.

The new attitude toward time and space infected the workshop
and the counting house, the army and the city. The tempo became
faster: the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern culture
launched itself into space and gave itself over to movement. Wliat
Max Weber called the “romanticism of numbers” grew naturally out
of this interest. In time-keeping, in trading, in fighting men counted
numbers; and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers counted.

CULTURAL PREPARATION

4: The Influence of Capitalism

The romanticism of numbers had still another aspect, important
for the development of scientific habits of thought. This was the rise
of capitalism, and the change from a barter economy, facilitated by
small supplies of variable local coinage, to a money economy with
an international credit structure and a constant reference to the
abstract symbols of wealth: gold, drafts, bills of exchange, eventually
merely numbers.

From the standpoint of technique, this structure had its origin in
die towns of Northern Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, in
the fourteenth century; two hundred years later there Avas in existence
in Antwerp an international bourse, devoted to aiding speculation in
shipments from foreign ports and in money itself. By the middle
of the sixteenth century book-keeping by double entry, bills of ex-
change, letters of credit, and speculation in “futures” were all devel-
oped in essentially their modern form. Whereas die procedures of
science were not refined and codified until after Galileo and Newton,
finance had emerged in its present-day dress at the very beginning
of the machine age: Jacob Fugger and J. Pierpont Morgan could
understand each other’s methods and point of view and temperament
far better than Paracelsus and Einstein.

The development of capitalism brought the ne^v habits of abstrac-
tion and calculation into the lives of city people: only the country
folk, still existing on their more primitive local basis, were partly
immune. Capitalism turned people from tangibles to intangibles: its
symbol, as Sombart observes, is the account book: “its life-value lies
in its profit and loss account.” The “economy of acquisition,” which
had hitherto been practiced by rare and fabulous creatures like Midas
and Croesus, became once more the everyday mode: it tended to
replace the direct “economy of needs” and to substitute money-values
for life-values. The whole process of business took on more and
more an abstract form; it was concerned Avith non-commodities,
imaginary futures, hypothetical gains.

Karl Marx well summed up this ncAV process of transmutation:
“Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it,

24 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

everything, whether a commodity or not, is convertible into gold.
Everything becomes saleable and purchasable. Circulation is the
great social retort into which everything is thrown and out of which
everything is recovered as crystallized money. Not even the bones of
the saints are able to withstand this alchemy; and still less able to
withstand it are more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are
outside the commercial traffic of men. Just as all qualitative dif-
ferences between commodities are effaced in money, so money, a
radical leveller, effaces all distinctions. But money itself is a com-
modity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property
of an individual. Thus social power becomes private power in the
hands of a private person.”

Uiis last fact was particularly important for life and thought:
the quest of power by means of abstractions. One abstraction re-
enforced the otlier. Time was money: money was power: power
required the furtherance of trade and production: production was
diverted from tlie channels of direct use into those of remote trade,
toward the acquisition of larger profits, with a larger margin for new
capital expenditures for wars, foreign conquests, mines, productive
enterprises . . . more money and more power. Of all forms of
wealth, money alone is without assignable limits. The prince wlio
might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thou-
sand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and
taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury? Under
a money economy, to speed up the process of production was to
speed up the turnover: more money. And as the emphasis upon
money grew in part out of the increasing mobility of late medieval
society, with its international trade, so did the resulting money
economy promote more trade: landed wealth, humanized wealth,
houses, paintings, sculptures, books, even gold itself were all rela-
tively difficult to transport, whereas money could be transported after
pronouncing the proper abracadabra by a simple algebraic operation
on one side or another of the ledger.

In time, men were more at home with abstractions than they were
with the goods they represented. The typical operations of finance
were the acquisition or the exchange of magnitudes. “Even the day-

CULTURAL PREPARATION 25

dreams of the pecuniary day-dreamer,” as Veblen observed, “take
shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard units
of an impersonal magnitude.” Men became powerful to the extent
that they neglected the real world of wheat and wool, food and
clothes, and centered their attention on the purely quantitative rep-
resentation of it in tokens and symbols: to think in terms of mere
weight and number, to make quantity not alone an indication of value
but the criterion of value — ^that was the contribution of capitalism
to the mechanical world-picture. So the abstractions of capitalism
preceded the abstractions of modem science and re-enforced at every
point its typical lessons and its typical methods of procedure. The
clarification and the convenience, particularly for long distance trad-
ing in space and time were great: but the social price of these
economies was a high one. Mark Kepler’s words, published in 1595:
“As the ear is made to perceive sound and the eye to perceive color,
so the mind of man has been formed to understand, not all sorts of
things, but quantities. It perceives any given thing more clearly in
proportion as that thing is close to bare quantities as to its origins,
hut the further a thing recedes from quantities, the more darkness
and error inheres in it.”

Was it an accident that the founders and patrons of the Royal
Society in London — indeed some of the first experimenters in tire
physical sciences — ^were merchants from tlie City? King Charles II
might laugh uncontrollably when he heard that these gentlemen had
spent their time weighing air; but their instincts were justified, their
procedure was correct: the method itself belonged to their tradition,
and there was money in it. The power that was science and the pow’er
that was money were, in final analysis, the same kind of power: the
power of abstraction, measurement, quantification.

But it was not merely in the promotion of abstract habits of
thought and pragmatic interests and quantitative estimations that capi-
talism prepared the way for modern technics. From the beginning
machines and factory production, like big guns and armaments, made
direct demands for capital far above the small advances necessary to
provide the old-style handicraft worker with tools or keep him alive.
The freedom to operate independent workshops and factories, to use

26 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

machines and profit by them, went to those who had command of
capital. While the feudal families, with their command over the land,
often had a monopoly over such natural resources as were found
in the earth, and often retained an interest in glass-making, coal-
mining, and iron-works right down to modern times, the new mechan-
ical inventions lent themselves to exploitation by the merchant classes.
The incentive to mechanization lay in the greater profits that could
be extracted through the multiplied power and efficiency of tlie
madiine.

Thus, although capitalism and technics must be clearly distin-
guished at every stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon
it. The merchant accumulated capital by widening the scale of his
operations, quickening his turnover, and discovering new territories
for exploitation: the inventor carried on a parallel process by ex-
ploiting new methods of production and devising new things to be
produced. Sometimes trade appeared as a rival to the machine by
offering greater opportunities for profit: sometimes it curbed fiulher
developments in order to increase tire profit of a particular monopoly :
both motives are still operative in capitalist society. From the first,
there were disparities and conflicts between these two forms of ex-
ploitation: but trade was the older partner and exercised a higlier
authority. It was trade that gathered up new materials from the
Indies and from the Americas, new foods, new cereals, tobacco,
furs: it was trade that found a new market for the trash that was
turned out by eighteenth century mass-production: it was trade —
abetted by war — ^that developed the large-scale enterprises and the
administrative capacity and method that made it possible to create
the industrial system as a whole and weld together its various parts.

Whether machines would have been invented so rapidly and
pushed so zealously without the extra incentive of commercial profit
is extremely doubtful: for all the more skilled handicraft occupations
were deeply entrenched, and the introduction of printing, for ex-
ample, was delayed as much as twenty years in Paris by the bitter
opposition of the guild of scribes and copyists. But while technics
undoubtedly owes an honest debt to capitalism, as it does likewise
to war, it was nevertheless unfortunate that tlie machine was condi-

CULTURAL PREPARATION 27

tioned, at the outset, by these foreign institutions and took on char-
acteristics that had nothing essentially to do with the technical proc-
esses or the forms of work. Capitalism utilized the machine, not lb
further social welfare, but to increase private profit: mechanical
instruments were used for the aggrandizement of the ruling classes.
It was because of capitalism that the handicraft industries in both
Europe and other parts of the world were recklessly destroyed by
machine products, even when the latter were inferior to tlie thing
they replaced : for the prestige of improvement and success and power
was with the machine, even when it improved nothing, even when
technically speaking it was a failure. It was because of the possi-
bilities of profit that the place of the machine was overemphasized
and the degree of regimentation pushed beyond what was necessary
to harmony or efficiency. It was because of certain traits in private
capitalism that the machine — ^which w’as a neutral agent — ^lias often
seemed, and in fact has sometimes been, a malicious element in
society, careless of human life, indifferent to human interests. The
machine has suffered for the sins of capitalism ; contrariwise, capital-
ism has often taken credit for the virtues of the machine.

By supporting the machine, capitalism quickened its pace, and
gave a special incentive to preoccupation with mechanical improve-
ments: though it often failed to reward the inventor, it succeeded by
blandishments and promises in stimulating him to further effort. In
many departments the pace was over-accelerated, and the stimulus
was over-applied: indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes
and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, intro-
duced an element of instability into technics and kept society from
assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating them in an
appropriate social pattern. As capitalism itself has developed and
expanded, these vices have in fact grown more enormous, and the
dangers to society as a whole have likewise grown proportionately.
Enough here to notice the close historical association of modern
technics and modern capitalism, and to point out that, for all this
historical development, there is no necessary connection between
them. Capitalism has existed in other civilizations, which had a
relatively low technical development; and technics made steady im-

28 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

provements from the tenth to the fifteenth century without the special
incentive of capitalism. But the style of the machine has up to the
present been powerfully influenced by capitalism: the emphasis upon
bigness, for example, is a commercial trait; it appeared in guild halls
and merchants’ houses long before it was evident in technics, with its
originally modest scale of operations.

5: From Fable to Fact

Meanwhile, with the transformation of the concepts of time and
space went a change in the direction of interest from the heavenly
world to the natural one. Around the twelfth century the supernatural
world, in which the European mind had been enveloped as in a
cloud from the decay of the classic schools of thought onward, began
to lift: the beautiful culture of Provence whose language Dante
himself had thought perhaps to use for his Divine Comedy, was the
first bud of the new order: a bud destined to be savagely blighted
by the Albigensian crusade.

Every culture lives within its dream. That of Christianity was one
in which a fabulous heavenly world, filled with gods, saints, devils,
demons, angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim and dominions
•and powers, shot its fantastically magnified shapes and images across
the actual life of earthborn man. This dream pervades the life of a
culture as the fantasies of night dominate the mind of a sleeper: it
is reality — ^while the sleep lasts. But, like the sleeper, a culture lives
within an objective world that goes on through its sleeping or waking,
and sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, to modify it
or to make further sleep impossible.

By a slow natural process, the world of nature broke in upon the
medieval dream of hell and paradise and eternity: in the fresh
naturalistic sculpture of the thirteenth century churches one can
watch the first uneasy stir of tire sleeper, as the light of morning
strikes his eyes. At first, the craftsman’s interest in nature was a
confused one: side by side with the fine carvings of oak leaves and
hawthorn sprays, faithfully copied, tenderly arranged, the sculptor
still created strange monsters, gargoyles, chimeras, legendary beasts.
But the interest in nature steadily broadened and became more con-

CULTURAL PREPARATION

suming. The naive feeling of the thirteenth century artist turned into
the systematic exploration of the sixteenth century Botanists and
physiologists.

“In the Middle Ages,” as Emile Male said, “tlie idea of a thing
which a man formed for himself was always more real than the actual
thing itself, and we see why these mystical centuries had no con-
ception of what men now call science. The study of things for their
own sake held no meaning for the thoughtful man. . . . The task
for the student of nature was to discern the eternal truth that God
would have each thing express.” In escaping this attitude, the vulgar
had an advantage over the learned: their minds were less capable
of forging their own shackles. A rational common sense interest in
Nature was not a product of the new classical learning of the Renas-
cence; ratliei'j one must say, that a few centuries after it had flour-
ished among the peasants and the masons, it made its way by another
route into the court and the study and the university. Villard de
Honnecourt’s notebook, the precious bequest of a great master-mason,
has drawings of a bear, a swan, a grasshopper, a fly, a dragonfly, a
lobster, a lion and a pair of parroquets, all done directly from life.
The book of Nature reappeared, as in a palimpsest, through the heav-
enly book of the Word.

During the Middle Ages the external world had had no conceptual
hold upon the mind. Natural facts were insignificant compared with
the divine order and intention which Christ and his Church had
revealed: the visible world was merely a pledge and a symbol of
that Eternal World of whose blisses and damnations it gave such a
keen foretaste. People ate and drank and mated, basked in the sun
and grew solemn under the stars; but there was little meaning in this
immediate state: whatever significance the items of daily life had
was as stage accessories and costumes and rehearsals for tlie drama
of Man’s pilgrimage through eternity. How far could the mind go
in scientific mensuration and observation as long as the mystic num-
bers three and four and seven and nine and twelve filled every rela-
tion with an allegorical significance. Before the sequences in nature
could be studied, it w’-as necessary to discipline the imagination and
sharpen the vision: mystic second sight must be converted into factual

30 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

first sight. The artists had a fuller part in this discipline than they
have usually been credited with. In enumerating the many parts of
nature that cannot be studied witliout the “aid and intervening of
mathematics,” Francis Bacon properly includes perspective, music,
architecture, and engineering along witli the sciences of astronomy
and cosmography.

The change in attitude toward nature manifested itself in solitary
figures long before it became common. Roger Bacon’s experimental
precepts and his special researches in optics have long been common-
place knowledge; indeed, like the scientific vision of his Elizabethan
namesake they have been somewhat overrated ; their significance lies
in the fact that they represented a general trend. In the thirteentli
century, the pupils of Albertus Magnus were led by a new curiosity
to explore their environment, while Absalon of St. Victor complained
that the students wished to study “the conformation of the globe, the
nature of the elements, the place oE tlie stars, the nature of animals,
the violence of the wind, the life of herbs and roots.” Dante and
Petrarch, unlike most medieval men, no longer avoided mountains
as mere terrifying obstacles that increased the hardships of travel:
they sought them and climbed them, for the exaltation that comes
from the conquest of distance and the attainment of a bird’s-eye
view. Later, Leonardo explored the hills of Tuscany, discovered
fossils, made correct interpretations of the processes of geology:
Agricola, urged on by his interest in mining, di<l the same. The
herbals and treatises on natural history that came out during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though they still mingled fable
and conjecture with fact, were resolute steps toward the (hdineation
of nature: their admirable pictures still witness this. And the little
books on the seasons and the routine of daily life moved in the same
direction. The great painters were not far behind. Tiie Sistine Chapel,
no less than Rembrandt’s famous picture, was an anatomy lesson, and
Leonardo was a worthy predecessor to Vesalius, whose life over-
lapped his. In tlie sixteenth century, according to Beckmann, there
were numerous private natural history collections, and in 1659 Elias
Ashmole purchased the Tradescant collection, which he later pre-
sented to Oxford.

CULTURAL PREPARATION

The discovery of nature as a whole was the most important part
of that era of discovery which began for the Western World with
the Crusades and the travels of Marco Polo and the southward ven-
tures of the Portuguese. Nature existed to be explored, to he invaded,
to be conquered, and finally, to be understood. Dissolving, the medie-
val dream disclosed the world of nature, as a lifting mist opens to
view the rocks and trees and herds on a hillside, whose existence had
been heralded only by the occasional tinkling of bells or the lowing
of a cow. Unfortunately, the medieval habit of separating the soul of
man from the life of the material world persisted, though the theology
that supported it was weakened; for as soon as the procedure of
exploration was definitely outlined in the philosophy and mechanics
of the seventeenth century man himself was excluded from the pic-
ture. Technics perhaps temporarily profiled by this exclusion; but
in the long run tlie result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting
to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or,
what comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of
himself except that which was bent on seizing power.

6: The Obstacle of Animism

The great series of technical improvements that began to crystal-
lize around the sixteenth century rested on a dissociation of the
animate and the mechanical. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the
way of this dissociation was the persistence of inveterate habits of
animistic thinking. Despite animism, such dissociations had indeed
been made in the past: one of the greatest of such acts was the
invention of the wheel. Even in the relatively advanced civilization
of tire Assyrians one sees representations of great statues being moved
across bare ground on a sledge. Doubtless the notion of the wheel
came originally from observing tliat rolling a log was easier than
shoving it: but trees existed for untold years and the trimming of
trees had gone on for many thousands, in all likelihood, before some
neolithic inventor performed the stunning act of dissociation that
made possible the cart.

So long as every object, animate or inanimate, was looked upon
as the dwelling place of a spirit, so long as one expected a tree or a

32 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

ship to behave like a living creature, it was next to impossible to
isolate as a mechanical sequence the special function one sought to
serve. Just as the Egyptian workman, when he made tlie leg of a
chair, fashioned it to represent the leg of a bullock, so the desire
naively to reproduce the organic, and to conjure up giants and djinns
for power, instead of contriving tlieir abstract equivalent, retarded
the development of the machine. Nature often assists in such abstrac-
tion: the swan’s use of its wing may have suggested the sail, even
as the hornet’s nest suggested paper. Conversely, the body itself is
a sort of microcosm of the machine: the arms are levers, tlie lungs
are bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart is a pump, the fist is a
hammer, the nerves are a telegraph system connected with a central
station: but on the w'hole, the mechanical instruments were invented
before the physiological functions were accurately described. The
most ineffective kind of machine is the realistic mechanical imitation
of a man or another animal: technics remembers Vaucanson for his
loom, rather than for his life-like mechanical duck, which not merely
ate food but -went through the routine of digestion and excretion.

The original advances in modern technics became possible only
when a mechanical system could be isolated from the entire tissue
of relations. Not merely did the first airplane, like that of Leonardo,
attempt to reproduce the motion of birds’ wings: as late as 1897
Ader’s batlike airplane, which now hangs in the Conservatoire des
Arts et Metiers in Paris had its ribs fashioned like a bat’s body,
and the very propellers, as if to exhaust all the zoological possi-
bilities, were made of thin, split wood, as much as possible like birds’
feathers. Similarly, the belief that reciprocating motion, as in tlie
movement of the arms and legs, was the “natural” form of motion
was used to justify opposition to the original conception of the
turbine. Branca’s plan of a steam-engine at the beginning of the
seventeenth century showed the boiler in the form of the head and
torso of a man. Circular motion, one of the most useful and frequent
attributes of a fully developed machine is, curiously, one of the least
observable motions in nature: even the stars do not describe a circular
course, and except for the rotifers, man himself, in occasional dances
and handsprings, is the chief exponent of rotary motion.

CULTURAL PREPARATION 33

The specific triumph of the technical imagination rested on the
ability to dissociate lifting power from the arm and create a crane:
to dissociate work from the action of men and animals and create
the water-mill: to dissociate light from the cumbustion of wood and
oil and create the electric lamp. For thousands of years animism
had stood in the way of this development; for it had concealed the
entire face of nature behind a scrawl of human forms: even the stars
were grouped together in the living figures of Castor and Pollux or
the Bull on the faintest points of resemblance. Life, not content with
its own province, had flowed incontinently into stones, rivers, stars,
and all the natural elements: tlie external environment, because it
was so immediately part of man, remained capricious, mischievous,
a reflection of his own disordered urges and fears.

Since the world seemed, in essence, animistic, and since these
^^externaF’ powers threatened man, the only method of escape that
his own will-to-power could follow was either the discipline of the
self or the conquest of other men: the way of religion or the way
of war. I shall discuss, in another place, the special contribution
that the technique and animus of warfare made to the development
of the machine; as for the discipline of the personality it was essen-
tially, during the Middle Ages, the province of the Church, and it
had gone farthest, of course, not among the peasants and nobles,
still clinging to essentially pagan ways of thought, with which the
Church had expediently compromised: it had gone farthest in the
monasteries and the universities.

Here animism was extruded by a sense of the omnipotence of a
single Spirit, refined, by the very enlargement of His duties, out of
any semblance of merely human or animal capacities. God had
created an orderly world, and his Law prevailed in it. His acts were
perhaps inscrutable; but they w^ere not capricious: the wfiole burden
of the religious life was to create an attitude of humility toward the
ways of God and the world he had created. If the underlying faith
of the Middle Ages remained superstitious and animistic, the meta-
physical doctrines of the Schoolmen were in fact anti-animistic: the
gist of the matter was that God’s world was not man’s, and that
only the church could form a bridge between man and the aI)soluie.

34 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

The meaning of this division did not fully become apparent until
the Schoolmen themselves had fallen into disrepute and their in-
heritors, like Descartes, had begun to take advantage of the old
breach by describing on a purely mechanical basis the entire world
of nature — leaving out only tlie Church’s special province, the soul
of man. It was by reason of the Church’s belief in an orderly inde-
pendent world, as Wliilehead has shown in Science and the Modern
World, that the work of science could go on so confidently. The
humanists of the sixteenth century might frequently be sceptics and
atheists, scandalously mocking tlie Church even when they remained
within its fold; it is perhaps no accident that the serious scientists
of the seventeenth century, like Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton,
Pascal, were so uniformly devout men. The next step in development,
partly made by Descartes himself, was the transfer of order from
God to the Machine. For God became in the eighteenth century the
Eternal Clockmaker who, having conceived and created and wound
up the clock of the universe, had no further responsibility until the
machine ultimately broke up — or, as the nineteenth century thought,
until the works ran down.

Hie method of science and technology, in their developed forms,
implies a sterilization of the self, an elimination, as far as possible,
of the human bias and preference, including the human pleasure in
man’s own image and the instinctive belief in the immediate presen-
tations of his fantasies. What better preparation could a whole cul-
ture have for such an effort than the spread of the monastic system
and the multiplication of a host of separate communities, dedicated
to the living of a humble and self-abnegating life, under a strict rule?
Here, in the monastery, was a relatively non-animistic, non-organic
world: the temptations of the body were minimized in theory and,
despite strain and irregularity, often minimized in ])ractict — more
often, at all events, than in secular life. The effort to exalt the indi-
vidual self was suspended in the collective routine.

Like the machine, the monastery was incapable of self-perpetuation
except by renewal from witliout. And apart from the fact that women
were similarly organized in nunneries, the monastery was like the
army, a strictly masculine world. Like the army, again, it sharpened

CULTURAL PREPARATION

and disciplined and focussed the masculine will-to-power: a suc-
cession of military leaders came from the religious orders, while the
leader of the order that exemplified the ideals of the Counter-Refor-
mation began his life as a soldier. One of the first experimental
scientists, Roger Bacon, was a monk; so, again, was Michael Stifel,
who in 1544 widened the use of symbols in algebraic equations; the
monks stood high in the roll of mechanics and inventors. The spiritual
routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the machine,
at least nullified many of the influences that worked against it. And
unlike the similar discipline of the Buddhists, that of the Western
monks gave rise to more fertile and complex kinds of machinery tlian
prayer wheels.

In still another way did the institutions of tlie Church perhaps
prepare tlie way for the machine: in their contempt for the body.
Now respect for the body and its organs is deep in all the classic
cultures of the past. Sometimes, in being imaginatively projected,
the body may be displaced symbolically by the parts or organs of
another animal, as in the Egyptian Horus: but the substitution is
made for the sake of intensifying some organic quality, the power
of muscle, eye, genitals. Tlie phalluses that were carried in a
religious procession were greater and more powerful, by represen-
tation, than the actual human organs: so, too, the images of the
gods might attain heroic size, to accentuate their vitality. The whole
ritual of life in the old cultures tended to emphasize respect for the
body and to dwell on its beauties and delights: even the monks who
painted the Ajanta caves of India were under its spell. The enthrone-
ment of tlie human form in sculpture, and tlie care of the body in
the palestra of the Greeks or the baths of the Romans, re-enforced
this inner feeling for the organic. The legend about Procrustes
typifies the horror and the resentment that classic peoples felt against
the mutilation of the body: one made beds to fit human beings, one
did not chop off legs or heads to fit beds.

This affirmative sense of the body surely never disappeared, even
during the severest triumphs of Christianity: every new pair of lovers
recovers it through their physical delight in each other. Similarly,
the prevalence of gluttony as a sin during the Middle Ages was a

36 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

witness to the importance of the belly. But tlie systematic teachings
of the Church were directed against tlie body and its culture: if on
one hand it was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, it was also vile and
sinful by nature: the flesh tended to corruption, and to achieve the
pious ends of life one must mortify it and subdue it, lessening its
appetites by fasting and abstention. Such was the letter of the
Church’s teaching; and while one cannot suppose that the mass of
humanity kept close to the letter, the feeling against the body’s
exposure, its uses, its celebration, was there.

While public hath houses were common in the Middle Ages, con-
trary to the complacent superstition that developed after the Renas-
cence abandoned them, those who were truly holy neglected to bathe
the body; they chafed their skin in hair shirts, they whipped them-
selves, they turned their eyes with charitable interest upon the sore
and leprous and deformed. Hating the body, the orthodox minds of
the Middle Ages were prepared to do it violence. Instead of resent-
ing the machines that could counterfeit this or that action of the
body, they could welcome them. The forms of the machine were no
more ugly or repulsive than the bodies of crippled and battered men
and women, or, if they were repulsive and ugly, they were that much
further away from being a temptation to the flesh. The writer in the
Niirnberg Chronicle in 1398 might say that “wheeled engines per-
forming strange tasks and shows and follies come directly from the
devil” — ^but in spite of itself, the Church was creating devil’s
disciples.

The fact is, at all events, that the machine came most slowly into
agriculture, with its life-conserving, life-maintaining functions, while
it prospered lustily precisely in those parts of the environment where
the body was most infamously treated by custom: namely, in the
monastery, in the mine, on the battlefield.

7 : The Road Through Magic

Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and tech-
nology, there is an intermediate station: that of magic. It was in
magic that the general conquest of the external environment was
decisively instituted. Without the order that the Church provided

CULTURAL PREPARATION

the campaign would possibly have been unthinkable; but without the
wild, scrambled daring of the magicians the first positions would not
have been taken. For the magicians not only believed in marvels but
audaciously sought to work them: by their straining after the excep-
tional, the natural philosophers who followed them were first given
a clue to the regular.

The dream of conquering nature is one of the oldest that has
flowed and ebbed in man’s mind. Each great epoch in human history
in which this will has found a positive outlet marks a rise in human
culture and a permanent contribution to man’s security and well-
being. Prometheus, the fire-bringer, stands at the beginning of man’s
conquest: for fire not merely made possible the easier digestion of
foods, but its flames kept off predatory animals, and around the
warmth of it, during the colder seasons of the year, an active social
life became possible, beyond the mere huddle and vacuity of the
winter’s sleep. The slow advances in making tools and weapons and
utensils that marked the earlier stone periods were a pedestrian
conquest of the environment: gains by inches. In the neolithic period
came the first great lift, with the domestication of plants and animals,
the making of orderly and effective astronomical observations, and
the spread of a relatively peaceful big-stone civilization in many
lands separated over the planet. Fire-making, agriculture, pottery,
astronomy, were marvellous collective leaps: dominations rather than
adaptations. For thousands of years men must have dreamed, vainly,
of further short-cuts and controls.

Beyond the great and perhaps relatively short period of neolithic
invention the advances, up to the tenth century of our own era, had
been relatively small except in the use of metals. But the hope
of some larger conquest, some more fundamental reversal of man’s
dependent relation upon a merciless and indifferent external world
continued to haunt his dreams and even his prayers: the myths and
fairy stories are a testimony to his desire for plenitude and power,
for freedom of movement and length of days.

Looking at the bird, men dreamed of flight: perhaps one of the
most universal of man’s envies and desires: Daedalus among the
Greeks, Ayar Katsi, the flying man, among the Peruvian Indians, to

38 TECHNICS AND CIVILI2ATI0N

say nothing of Rah and Neith, Astarte and Psyche, or the Angels
of Christianity. In the thirteenth century, this dream reappeared
prophetically in the mind of Roger Bacon. The flying carpet of the
Arabian Nights, tlie seven-leagued boots, the wishing ring, were all
evidences of the desire to fly, to travel fast, to diminish space, to
remove the obstacle of distance. Along with this went a fairly con-
stant desire to deliver the body from its infirmities, from its early
aging, which dries up its powers, and from the diseases that threaten
life even in the midst of vigor and youth. The gods may be defined
as beings of somewhat more than human stature that have these
powers of defying space and time and the cycle of growth and
decay: even in the Christian legend lire ability to make the lame
walk and the blind see is one of the proofs of godhood. Imhotep and
Aesculapius, by reason of their skill in the medical arts, were raised
into deities by the Egyptians and the Greeks. Oppressed by want
and starvation, tlie dream of the horn of plenty and die Earthly
Paradise continued to haunt man.

It was in the North that these myths of extended powers took on an
added firmness, perhaps, from die actual achievements of the miners
and smiths: one remembers Thor, master of the thunder, whose magic
hammer made him so potent: one remembers Loki, the cunning and
mischievous god of fire: one remembers the gnomes who created the
magic armor and weapons of Siegfried — Ilmarinen of the Finns,
who made a steel eagle, and Wieland, the fabulous German smith,
who made feather clothes for flight. Back of all these fables, these
collective wishes and utopias, lay the desire to prevail over the brute
nature of things.

But the very dreams that exhibited these desires were a revelation
of the difficulty of achieving diem. The dream gives direction to
human activity and both expresses the inner urge of the organism
and conjures up appropriate goals. But when the dream strides too
far ahead of fact, it tends to short-circuit action: the anticipatory
subjective pleasure serves as a surrogate for die thought and con-
trivance and action that might give it a foothold in reality. The dis-
embodied desire, xmconnected with the conditions of its fulfillment
or with its means of expression, leads nowhere: at most it contributes

CULTURAL PREPARATION 39

to an inner equilibrium. How difficult was the discipline required
before mechanical invention became possible one sees in the part
played by magic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Magic, like pure fantasy, was a short cut to knowledge and power.
But even in the most primitive form of shamanism, magic involves
a drama and an action: if one wishes to kill one’s enemy by magic,
one must at least mould a wax figure and stick pins into it; and
similarly, if tlie need for gold in early capitalism promoted a grand
quest for tlie means of transmuting base metals into noble ones, it
was accompanied by fumbling and frantic attempts to manipulate the
external environment. Under magic, the experimenter acknowledged
that it was necessary to have a sow’s ear before one could make a
silk purse: this was a real advance toward matter-of-fact. “The
operations,” as Lynn Thorndike well says of magic, “were supposed
to be efficacious here in the world of external reality”: magic pre-
supposed a public demonstration rather than a merely private grati-
fication.

No one can put his finger on the place where magic became
science, where empiricism became systematic experimentalism, whei’e
alchemy became chemistiy, where astrology became astronomy, in
short, where the need for immediate human results and gratifications
ceased to leave its smudgy imprint. Magic was marked above all
perhaps by two unscientific qualities: by secrets and mystifications,
and by a certain impatience for “results.” According to Agricola
the transmutationists of the sixteenth century did not hesitate to con-
ceal gold in a pellet of ore, in order to make their experiment come
out successfully: similar dodges, like a concealed clock-winder, were
used in the numerous perpetual motion machines that were put
forward. Everywhere the dross of fraud and charlatanism mingled
with the occasional grains of scientific knowledge that magic utilized
or produced.

But the instruments of research were developed before a method
of procedure was found; and if gold did not come out of lead in
the experiments of the alchemists, they are not to be reproached for
their ineptitude but congratulated on their audacity: their imagina-
tions sniffed quarry in a cave they could not penetrate, and their

40 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

baying and pointing finally called the hunters to the spot. Something
more important than gold came out of the researches of the alchem-
ists: the retort and the furnace and the alembic: the habit of manipu-
lation by crushing, grinding, firing, distilling, dissolving — ^valuable
apparatus for real experiments, valuable methods for real science.
The source of authority for the magicians ceased to be Aristotle and
the Fathers of the Church: they relied upon what their hands could
do and their eyes could see, with the aid of mortar and pestle and
furnace. Magic rested on demonstration rather than dialectic: more
than anything else, perhaps, except painting, it released European
thought from the tyranny of the written text.

In sum, magic turned men’s minds to the external world: it sug-
gested the need of manipulating it: it helped create the tools for
successfully achieving this, and it sharpened observation as to the
results. The philosopher’s stone was not found, but the science of
chemistry emerged, to enrich us far beyond the simple dreams of
the gold-seekers. The herbalist, zealous in his quest for simples and
cure-alls, led the way for the intensive explorations of the botanist
and the physician: despite our boasts of accurate coal tar drugs, one
must not forget that one of tlie few genuine specifics in medicine,
quinine, comes from the cinchona bark, and that chaulmoogra oil,
used with success in treating leprosy, likewise comes from an exotic
tree. As children’s play anticipates crudely adult life, so did magic
anticipate modern science and technology: it was chiefly the lack of
direction that was fantastic: tlie difficulty was not in using the instru-
ment but in finding a field where it could be applied and finding the
right system for applying it. Much of seventeenth century science,
though no longer tainted with charlatanism, was just as fantastic. It
needed centuries of systematic effort to develop the technique which
has given us Ehrlich’s salvarsan or Bayer 207. But magic was the
bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with
the engines of fulfillment. The subjective confidence of the magicians,
seeking to inflate their private egos with boundless wealth and mys-
terious energies, surmounted even their practical failures: their
fiery hopes, their crazy dreams, their cracked homunculi continued

CULTURAL PREPARATION

to gleam in the ashes: to have dreamed so riotously was to make the
technics that followed less incredible and hence less impossible.

8: Social Regimentation

If mechanical thinking and ingenious experiment produced the
machine, regimentation gave it a soil to grow in: the social process
worked hand in hand with the new ideology and the new technics.
Long before the peoples of the Western World turned to the machine,
mechanism as an element in social life had come into existence.
Before inventors created engines to take the place of men, the leaders
of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they
had discovered how to reduce men to machines. The slaves and
peasants who hauled the stones for the pyramids, pulling in rhythm
to the crack of the whip, the slaves working in tlie Roman galley,
each man chained to his seat and unable to perform any other motion
than tlie limited mechanical one, the order and march and system
of attack of the Macedonian phalanx — ^these were all machine
phenomena. Whatever limits the actions and movements of human
beings to their bare mechanical elements belongs to the physiology,
if not to the mechanics, of the machine age.

From the fifteenth century on invention and regimentation w'orked
reciprocally. The increase in the number and kinds of machines,
mills, guns, clocks, lifelike automata, must have suggested mechani-
cal attributes for men and extended the analogies of mechanism to
more subtle and complex organic facts: by the seventeenth century
this turn of interest disclosed itself in philosophy. Descartes, in
analyzing the physiology of the human body, remarks that its func-
tioning apart from the guidance of the will does not “appear at all
strange to those who are acquainted with the variety of movements
performed by the different automata, or moving machines fabricated
by human industry, and with the help of but a few pieces compared
with the great multitude of bones, nerves, arteries, veins, and other
parts that are found in the body of each animal. Such persons will
look upon this body as a machine made by the hand of God.” But
the opposite process was also true: the mechanization of human habits
prepared the way for mechanical imitations.

42 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

To the degree that fear and disruption prevail in society, men tend
to seek an absolute: if it does not exist, they project it. Regimentation
gave the men of the period a finality they could discover nowhere
else. If one of the phenomena of the breakdown of the medieval
order was the turbulence that made men freebooters, discoverers,
pioneers, breaking away from the tameness of the old ways and the
rigor of self-imposed disciplines, the other phenomenon, related
to it, but compulsively drawing society into a regimented mould, was
the methodical routine of the drillmaster and the book-keeper, the
soldier and the bureaucrat. These masters of regimentation gained
full ascendency in the seventeenth century. The new bourgeoisie, in
counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uniirterrupted
routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure
— all carefully measured out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse
of Tristram Shandy’s father, which coincided, symbolically, with
the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts:
timed w'ork: timed meals: from this period on nothing was quite
free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time
became for protestant religious preachers, like Richard Baxter, one
of the most heinous sins. To spend time in mere sociability, or even
in sleep, was reprehensible.

The ideal man of the new order was Robinson Crusoe. No wonder
he indoctrinated children with his virtues for two centuries, and
served as the model for a score of sage discourses on the Economic
Man. Robinson Crusoe was all the more representative as a tale
not only because it was the work of one of the new breed of writers,
the professional journalists, but because it combines in a single set-
ting the element of catastrophe and adventure with the necessity
for invention. In the new economic system every man w'as for him-
self. The dominant virtues were thrift, foresight, skillful adaptation
of means. Invention took the place of image-making and ritual;
experiment took the place of contemplation; demonstration took the
place of deductive logic and authority. Even alone on a desert island
the sober middle class virtues would carry one through. . . .

Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class sobriety
and gave them God’s sanction. True; the main devices of finance

CULTURAL PREPARATION 43

were a product of Catholic Europe, and Protestantism has received
undeserved praise as a liberating force from medieval routine and
undeserved censure as the original source and spiritual justification
of modern capitalism. But the peculiar office of Protestantism was
to unite finance to the concept of a godly life and to tuim the
asceticism countenanced by religion into a device for concentration
upon worldly goods and worldly aflvancement. Protestantism rested
firmly on the abstractions of print and money. Religion was to be
found, not simply in the fellowship of religious spirits, connected
historically through the Church and communicating with God through
an elaborate ritual: it was to be found in the Avord itself: the word
without its communal background. In the last analysis, the individual
must fend for himself in heaven, as he did on the exchange. The
expression of collective beliefs through the aits was a snare: so the
Protestant stripped the images from his Cathedral and left the bare
stones of engineering: he distrusted all painting, except perhaps
portrait painting, which mirrored his righteousness; and he looked
upon the theater and the dance as a lewdness of the devil. Life, in all
its sensuous variety and warm delight, was drained out of die
Protestant’s world of thought: the organic disappeared. Time Avas
real: keep it! Labor was real: exert it! Money Avas real: save it!
Space Avas real: conquer it! Matter Avas real: measure it! These
were the realities and the imperatives of the middle class philosophy.
Apart from the surviving scheme of divine salvation all its impulses
were already put under the rule of weight and measure and quantity:
day and life Avere completely regimented. In the eighteenth century
Benjamin Franklin, Avho had perhaps been anticipated by the Jesuits,
capped the process by inventing a system of moral book-keeping.

Hoav was it that the power motive became isolated and intensified
toward the close of the Middle Ages?

Each element in life forms part of a cultural mesh: one part
implicates, restrains, helps to express the other. During this period
the mesh W'as broken, and a fragment escaped and launched itself
on a separate career — the Avill to dominate the environment. To domi-
nate, not to cultivate: to seize poAver, not to achieve form. One cannot,
plainly, embrace a complex series of events in such simple terms

44 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

alone. Another factor in the change may have been due to an intensi-
fied sense of inferiority: this perhaps arose through the humiliating
disparity between man’s ideal pretensions and his real accomplish-
ments — between tlie charity and peace preached by the Church and
its eternal wars and feuds and animosities, between the holy life as
preached by the saints and the lascivious life as lived by the Renascence
Popes, between the belief in heaven and the squalid disorder and
distress of actual existence. Failing redemption by grace, harmoniza-
tion of desires, the Christian virtues, people sought, perhaps, to wipe
out their sense of inferiority and overcome their frustration by seek-
ing power.

At all events, the old synthesis had broken down in thought and in
social action. In no little degree, it had broken down because it was
an inadequate one: a closed, perhaps fundamentally neurotic con-
ception of human life and destiny, which originally had sprung out
of the misery and terror that had attended both the brutality of
imperialistic Rome and its ultimate putrefaction and decay. So
remote were the attitudes and concepts of Christianity from the facts
of the natural world and of human life, that once the world itself
was opened up by navigation and exploration, by the new cosmology,
by new methods of observation and experiment, there was no return-
ing to the broken shell of the old order. The split between the
Heavenly system and the Earthly one had become too grave to be
overlooked, too wide to be bridged: human life had a destiny out-
side that shell. The crudest science touched closer to contemporary
truth than the most refined scholasticism: the clumsiest steam engine
or spinning jenny had more efficiency than the soundest guild regula-
tion, and the paltriest factory and iron bridge had more promise for
architecture than the most masterly buildings of Wren and Adam;
the first yard of cloth woven by machine, the first plain iron casting,
had potentially more esthetic interest than jewelry fashioned by a
Cellini or the canvas covered by a Reynolds. In short: a live machine
was better than a dead organism; and the organism of medieval
culture was dead.

From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth men lived in an
empty world: a world that was daily growing emptier. They said

CULTURAL PREPARATION

their prayers, they repeated their formulas; they even sought to
retrieve the holiness they had lost by resurrecting superstitions
they had long abandoned: hence the fierceness and hollow fanaticism
of the Counter-Reformation, its burning of heretics, its persecution
of witches, preciscdy in the midst of the growing “enlightenment.”
They threw themselves back into the medieval dream with a new
intensity of feeling, if not conviction: lliey carved and painted and
wrote — who indeed ever hewed more mightily in stone than Michel-
angelo, who wrote with more spectacular ecstasy and vigor than
Shakespeare? But beneath the .surface occupied by these works of
art and thought was a dead %vorld, an empty world, a void that no
amount of dash and bra\mra could fill up. The arts shot up into the
air in a hundred pulsing fountains, for it is just at the moment of
cultural and social tlissolution that the mind often w’orks with a
freedom and intensity that is not possible when the social pattern is
stable and life us a whole is more satisfactory: but the idolum itself
had become empty.

Men no Iong(u' believed, without practical reservations, in heaven
and hell and the communion of the saints: still less did they believe
in the smooth go<ls and goddesses and sylphs and muses whom they
used, with elegant but meaningless gestures, to adorn their thoughts
and embellish their environment: these supernatural figures, though
they were human in origin and in consonance with certain stable
human needs, had become wraiths. Observe the infant Jesus of a
thirteenth centuiy altarpiece: the infant lies on an altar, apart; the
Virgin is transfixed ami beatified by the presence of the Holy
Ghost: the myth is real. Observe the Holy Families of the sixteenth
and .seventeenth century painting: fashionable young ladies are
coddling their wcll-fed human infants: the myth has died. First only
the gorgeous clothes are left: finally a doll takes the place of the
living child: a mechanical puppet. Mechanics became the new re-
ligion, and it gave to the w'orld a new Messiah: the machine.

9: The Mechanical Universe

The issues of practical life found their justification and their
appropriate frame of ideas in the natural philosophy of the seven-

46 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

teendi century: this philosophy has remained, in effect, the working
creed of technics, even though its ideology has been challenged,
modified, amplified, and in part undermined by the further pursuit
of science itself. A series of thinkers. Bacon, Descartes, Galileo,
Newton, Pascal, defined the province of science, elaborated its
special technique of research, and demonstrated its efficacy.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were only scat-
tered efforts of thought, some scholastic, some Aristotelian, some
mathematical and scientific, as in the astronomical observations of
Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler: the machine had had only
an incidental part to play in these intellectual advances. At the end,
despite the relative sterility of invention itself during this century,
tliere existed a fully articulated philosophy of the universe, on
purely mechanical lines, which served as a starting point for all
the physical sciences and for further technical improvements: the
mechanical WeUbild had come into existence. Mechanics set the
pattern of successful research and shrewd application. Up to this
time the biological sciences had paralleled the physical sciences:
thereafter, for at least a century and a half, they played second
fiddle; and it was not until after 1860 that biological facts were
recognized as an important basis for technics.

By what means was the new mechanical picture put together? And
how did it come to provide such an excellent soil for the propagation
of inventions and the spread of machines?

The method of the physical sciences rested fundamentally upon
a few simple principles. First: the elimination of qualities, and the
reduction of the complex to the simple by paying attention only
to those aspects of events which could be weighed, measured, or
counted, and to the particular kind of space-time sequence that could
be controlled and repeated — or, as in astronomy, whose repetition
could be predicted. Second: concentration upon the outer world,
and the elimination or neutralization of the observer as respects the
daza with which he works. Third: isolation: limitation of the field:
specialization of interest and subdivision of labor. In short, what
the physical sciences call the world is not the total object of com-
mon human experience: it is just those aspects of this experience

CULTURAL PREPARATION 47

that lend tliemselves to accurate factual observation and to gen-
eralized statements. One may define a mechanical system as one
in which any random sample of the whole will serve in place of
the whole: an ounce of pure water in the laboratory is supposed to
have the same properties as a hundred cubic feet of equally pure
water in the cistern and the environment of the object is not sup-
posed to affect its ])chavior. Our modern concepts of space and time
make it seem doubtful if any pure mechanical system really exists:
but the original bias of natural philosophy was to discard organic
complexes and to seek isolates which could be described, for practi-
cal purposes, as if they completely represented the “physical world”
from which they liad been extracted.

This elimination of the organic had the justification not only of
practical interest but of history itself, ’^liereas Socrates had turned
his back upon the Ionian philosophers because he %vas more con-
cerned to learn about man’s dilemmas than to learn about trees,
rivers, and stars, all that could be called positive knowledge, which
had survived the rise and fall of human societies, were just such non-
vital trutlis as the Pythagorean theorem. In contrast to the cycles
of taste, doctrine, fashion, there had been a steady accretion of
mathematical and physicail knowledge. In this development, the study
of astronomy had been a great aid: the stars could not be cajoled or
perverted: their courses were visible to the naked eye and could
be followed by any patient observer.

Compare the complex i)henomenon of an ox moving over a wind-
ing uneven road with the movements of a planet: it is easier to
trace an entire orbit than to plot the varying rate of speed and the
changes of position that takes place in the nearer and more familiar
object. To fix attention upon a mechanical system was the first step
toward creating system: an important victory for rational thought.
By centering effort upon the non-historic and the inorganic, the
physical sciences clarified tlie entire procedure of analysis: for the
field to which they confined their attention was one in which the
method could be pushed farthest without being too palpably inade-
quate or encountering too many special difficulties. But the real
physical world was still not simple enough for the scientific method

48 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

in its first stages of development: it was necessary to reduce it to
such elements as could be ordered in terms of space, time, mass,
motion, quantity. The amount of elimination and rejection that ac-
companied this was excellently described by Galileo, who gave the
process such a strong impetus. One must quote him in full:

“As soon as I form a conception of a material or corporeal sub-
stance, I simultaneously feel the necessity of conceiving that it has
boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others it is
great or small; that it is in this or that place, in this or that time;
that it is in motion or at rest; that it touches, or does not touch,
another body; that it is unique, rare, or common; nor can I, by any
act of imagination, disjoin it from these qualities. But I do not find
myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it as necessarily accom-
panied by such conditions as that it must be white or red, bitter or
sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly or disagreeably; and if
the senses had not pointed out these qualities language and imagina-
tion alone could never have arrived at them. Therefore I think that
these tastes, smells, colors, etc., with regard to the object in which
they appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names. They
exist only in the sensitive body, for when the living creature is
removed all these qualities are carried ofE and annihilated, although
we have imposed particular names upon them, and would fain per-
suade ourselves that they truly and in fact exist. I do not believe
that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes,
smells, and sounds, etc., except size, shape, quantity, and motion.”

In other words, physical science confined itself to the so-called
primary qualities: the secondary qualities are spurned as subjective.
But a primary quality is no more ultimate or elementary than a
secondary quality, and a sensitive body is no less real than an in-
sensitive body. Biologically speaking, smell was highly important
for survival: more so, perhaps, than the ability to discriminate dis-
tance or weight: for it is the chief means of determining whether
food is fit to eat, and pleasure in odors not merely refined the
process of eating but gave a special association to the visible symbols
of erotic interest, sublimated finally in perfume. The primary
qualities could be called prime only in terms of mathematical

CULTURAL PREPARATION 49

analysis, because they had, as an ultimate point of reference, an inde-
pendent measuring stick for time and space, a clock, a ruler, a
balance.

The value of concentrating upon primary qualities was that it
neutralized in experiment and analysis the sensory and emotional
reactions of the observer: apart from the process of thinking, he
became an instrument of record. In this mannei', scientific technique
became communal, impersonal, objective, within its limited field,
the purely conventional “material world.” This technique resulted
in a valuable moralization of tlaoughl: the standards, first worked
out in realms foreign to man’s personal aims and immediate inter-
ests, were equally applicable to more complex aspects of reality
that stood closer to his hopes, loves, ambitions. But the first effect
of this advance in clarity and in sobriety of thought was to devaluate
every department of experience except that which lent itself to mathe-
matical investigation. Wlien the Royal Society was founded in Eng-
land, die humanities were deliberately excluded.

In general, the practice of the physical sciences meant an intensi-
fication of the senses: the eye had never before been so sharp, the
ear so keen, the hand so accurate. Hooke, who had seen how glasses
improved seeing, doubted not that “there may be found Mechanical
Inventions to improve our other senses, of hearing, smelling, tasting,
touching.” But with this gain in accuracy, went a deformation of
experience as a whole. The instruments of science were helpless in
the realm of qualities. The qualitative was reduced to the subjective:
the subjective was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and unmeas-
urable non-existent. Intuition and feeling did not affect mechanical
process or mechanical explanations. Much could be accomplished by
the new science and the new technics because much that was asso-
ciated with life and work in the past — art, poetry, organic rhythm,
fantasy — ^was deliberately eliminated. As the outer world of percep-
tion grew in importance, the inner world of feeling became more
and more impotent.

The division of labor and the specialization in single parts of an
operation, which already had begun to characterize the economic
life of the seventeenth century, prevailed in the world of thought:

50 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

they were expressions of the same desire for mechanical accuracy
and for quick results. The field of research was progressively divided
up, and small parts of it were subject to intensive examination: in
small measures, so to say, truth might perfect be. This restriction was
a great practical device. To know the complete nature of an object
does not necessarily make one fit to M'ork with it: for complete
knowledge requires a plenitude of time: moreover, it tends finally
to a sort of identification which lacks precisely the cool aloofness
that enables one to handle it and manipulate it for external ends. If
one wishes to eat a chicken, one had better treat it as food from the
beginning, and not give it too much friendly attention or human
sympathy or even esthetic appreciation: if one treats the life of the
chicken as an end, one may even with Brahminical thoroughness
preserve the lice in its feathers as well as the bird. Selectivity is an
operation necessarily adopted by tlie organism to keep it from being
ovenvhelmed with irrelevant sensations and comprehensions. Science
gave this inevitable selectivity a new rationale: it singled out the
most negotiable set of relations, mass, weight, number, motion.

Unfortunately, isolation and abstraction, while important to
orderly research and refined symbolic representation, are likewise
conditions under which real organisms die, or at least cease to
function effectively. The rejection of experience in its original whole,
besides abolishing images and disparaging the non-instrumenlal
aspects of thought, had another grave result: on the positive side,
it was a belief in the dead; for the vital processes often escape close
observation so long as the organism is alive. In short, the accuracy
and simplicity of science, though they were responsible for its colos-
sal practical achievements, were not an approach to objective reality
but a departure from it. In their desire to achieve exact results the
physical sciences scorned true objectivity: individually, one side of
the personality was paralyzed; collectively, one side of experience
was ignored. To substitute mechanical or two-way time for history,
the dissected corpse for the living body, dismantled units called
“individuals” for men-in-groups, or in general the mechanically
measurable or reproducible for the inaccessible and the complicated
and the organically whole, is to achieve a limited practical mastery

CULTURAL PREPARATION

at the expense of truth and of the larger efficiency that depends on
truth.

By confining his operations to those aspects of reality which had,
so to say, market value, and by isolating and dismembering the
corpus of experience, the physical scientist created a habit of mind
favorable to discrete practical inventions: at the same time it was
highly unfavorable to all those forms of art for which the secondary
qualities and the individualized receptors and motivators of the
artist were of fundamental importance. By his consistent metaphysical
principles and his factual method of research, the physical scientist
denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his
hack upon real experience: he substituted for the body and blood
of reality a skeleton of clTective abstractions which he could manipu-
late with appropriate wires and pulleys.

Wliat was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and
motion: a waslelapd. In order to thrive at all, it was necessary for the
inheritors of the seventeenth century idolum to fill the world up
again with new organisms, devised to represent the new realities of
physical science. Machines — and machines alone — completely met
the requirements of tlie new scientific method and point of view:
they fulfilled the definition of “reality” far more perfectly tlian
living organisms. And once the mechanical world-picture was estab-
lished, machines could thrive and multiply and dominate existence:
their competitors had been exterminated or had been consigned to a
penumbral universe in which only artists and lovers and breeders
of animals dared to believe. Were machines not conceived in terms
of primary qualities alone, without regard to appearance, sound,
or any other sort of sensory stimulation? If science presented an
ultimate reality, then the machine was, like the law in Gilbert’s
ballad, the true embodiment of everything that was excellent. Indeed
in this empty, denuded world, the invention of machines became a
duty. By renouncing a large part of his humanity, a man could
achieve godhood: he dawned on this second chaos and created the
machine in his own image: the image of power, but power ripped
loose from his flesh and isolated from his humanity.

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

10: The Duty to Invent

The principles that had proved effective in the development o£
the scientific method were, with appropriate changes, those that
served as a foundation for invention. Technics is a translation into
appropriate, practical forms of the theoretic truths, implicit or
formulated, anticipated or discovered, of science. Science and tech-
nics form two independent yet related worlds: sometimes converging,
sometimes drawing apart. Mainly empirical inventions, like tlie
steam-engine, may suggest Carnot’s researches in thermodynamics:
abstract physical investigation, like Faraday’s with the magnetic
field, may lead directly to the invention of the dynamo. From the
geometry and astronomy of Egypt and Mesopotamia, both closely
connected with the practice of agriculture to the latest researches in
electro-physics, Leonardo’s dictum holds true: Science is the cap-
tain and practice tlie soldiers. But sometimes the soldiers win the
battle without leadership, and sometimes the captain, by intelligent
strategy, obtains victory without actually engaging in battle.

The displacement of the living and the organic took place rapidly
with the early development of the machine. For the machine was
a counterfeit of nature, nature analyzed, regulated, narrowed, con-
trolled by the mind of men. The ultimate goal of its development
was however not the mere conquest of nature but her resynthesis:
dismembered by thought, nature was put together again in new
combinations: material syntheses in chemistry, mechanical syntheses
in engineering. The unwillingness to accept the natural environment
as a fixed and final condition of man’s existence had always con-
tributed both to his art and his technics: but from the seventeenth
century, the attitude became compulsive, and it was to technics tliat
he turned for fulfillment. Steam engines displaced horse power, iron
and concrete displaced wood, aniline dyes replaced vegetable dyes,
and so on down the line, with here and there a gap. Sometimes the
new product was superior practically or esthetically to the old, as
in the infinite superiority of the electric lamp over the tallow candle:
sometimes the new product remained inferior in quality, as rayon
is still inferior to natural silk: but in either event the gain was in

CULTURAL PREPARATION

the creation of an equivalent product or synthesis which was less
dependent upon uncertain organic variations and irregularities in
either the product itself or the labor applied to it than was the original.

Often the knowledge upon which the displacement was made was
insufficient and the result was sometimes disastrous. The history of
the last thousand years abounds in examples of apparent mechanical
and scientific triumphs which were fundamentally unsoimd. One
need only mention bleeding in medicine, the use of common window
glass which excluded the important ultra-violet rays, the establish-
ment of the post-Liebig dietary on the basis of mere energy replace-
ment, the use of the elevated toilet seat, the introduction of steam
heat, which dries the air excessively — but the list is a long and
somewhat appalling one. The point is that invention had become a
duty, and the desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child’s
delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided
by critical discernment: people agreed that inventions were good,
whether or not they actually provided benefits, just as they agreed
that child-bearing was good, whether the offspring proved a blessing
to society or a nuisance.

Mechanical invention, even more than science, was the answer to
a dwindling faith and a faltering life-impulse. The meandering
energies of men, which had flowed over into meadow and garden, had
crept into grotto and cave, during the Renascence, were turned by
invention into a confined head of water above a turbine: they could
sparkle and ripple and cool and revive and delight no more: they
were harnessed for a narrow and definite purpose: to move wheels
and multiply society’s capacity for work. To live was to work: what
other life indeed do machines know? Faith had at last found a new
object, not the moving of mountains, but the moving of engines and
machines. Power: the application of power to motion, and the ap-
plication of motion to production, and of production to money-mak-
ing, and so the further increase of power — ^this was the worthiest
object that a mechanical habit of mind and a mechanical mode of
action put before men. As everyone recognizes, a thousand salutary
instruments came out of the new technics; but in origin from the
seventeenth century on the machine served as a substitute religion.

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

and a vital religion does not need the justification of mere utility.

The religion of the machine needed such support as little as the
transcendental faiths it supplanted: for the mission of religion is
to provide an ultimate significance and motive-force: the necessity
of invention was a dogma, and the ritual of a mechanical routine
was the binding element in the faith. In the eighteenth century,
Mechanical Societies sprang into existence, to propagate the creed
with greater zeal: they preached the gospel of work, justification by
faith in mechanical science, and salvation by the machine. Without
the missionary enthusiasm of the enterprisers and industrialists and
engineers and even the untutored mechanics from the eighteenth
century onward, it would be impossible to explain the rush of con-
verts and the accelerated tempo of mechanical improvement. The
impersonal procedure of science, the hard-headed’ contrivances of
mechanics, the rational calculus of the utilitarians — ^these interests
captured emotion, all the more because the golden paradise of finan-
cial success lay beyond.

In their compilation of inventions and discoveries, Darmstaedter
and Du Bois-Reymond enumerated the following inventors: between
1700 and 1750 — 170: between 1750 and 1800 — 344: between 1800
and 1850 — 861: between 1850 and 1900 — 1150. Even allowing for
the foreshortening brought about automatically by historical per-
spective, one cannot doubt the increased acceleration between 1700
and 1850. Technics had seized the imagination: the engines them-
selves and the goods they produced both seemed immediately desir-
able. While much good came through invention, much invention
came irrespective of the good. If the sanction of utility had been
uppermost, invention would have proceeded most rapidly in the de-
partments where human need was sharpest, in food, shelter, and
clothing: but although the last department undoubtedly advanced,
the farm and the common dwelling house were much slower to profit
by the new mechanical technology than were the battlefield and the
mine, while the conversion of gains in energy into a life abundant
took place much more slowly after the seventeenth century than it
had done during the previous seven hundred years!

Once in existence, the machine tended to justify itself by silently

CULTURAL PREPARATION 55

talcing over departments of life neglected in its ideology. Virtuosity
is an important element in the development of technics: the interest
in the materials as such, the pride of mastery over tools, the skilled
manipulation of form. The machine crystallized in new patterns the
whole set of independent interests which Thorstein Veblen grouped
loosely under “the instinct of workmanship,” and enriched technics
as a whole even when it temporarily depleted handicraft. The very
sensual and contemplative responses, excluded from love-making
and song and fantasy by the concentration upon the mechanical means
of production, were not of course finally excluded from life: they
re-entered it in association with the technical arts themselves, and
the machine, often lovingly personified as a living creature, as with
Kipling’s engineers, absorbed the affection and care of both inventor
and workman. Cranks, pistons, screws, valves, sinuous motions,
pulsations, rhythms, murmurs, sleek surfaces, all are virtual counter-
parts of the organs and functions of the body, and they stimulated
and absorbed some of the natural affections. But when that stage
was reached, the machine was no longer a means and its operations
were not merely mechanical and causal, but human and final: it
contributed, like any other work of art, to an organic equilibrium.
This development of value within the machine complex itself, apart
from the value of the products created by it, was, as we shall see at a
later stage, a profoundly important result of the new technology.

11 : Practical Anticipations

From the beginning, the practical value of science was upper-
most in the minds of its exponents, even in those who single-mindedly
pursued abstract truth, and who were as indifferent to its populariza-
tion as Gauss and Weber, the scientists who invented the telegraph
for their private communication. “If my judgment be of any weight,”
said Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning, “the use of
history mechanical is of all others the most radical and fundamental
towards natural philosophy: such natural philosophy as shall not
vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation, but
such as shall be operative to the endowment and benefit of man’s
life.” And Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, observes: “For by

56 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

them [general restrictions respecting physics] I perceived it to be
possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life; and in lieu of
the speculative philosophy usually taught in the schools to discover
a practical, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire,
water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that sur-
round us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans,
we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which
they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors
of nature. And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to the
invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be able to enjoy
without any trouble the fruits of the earth, and all its comforts, but
also especially for the preservation of health, which is without doubt
of all blessings of this life the first and fundamental one; for the
mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of
the organs of the body that if any means can ever be found to render
men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in
medicine they must be sought for.”

Who is rewarded in the perfect commonwealth devised by Bacon
in The New Atlantis? In Salomon’s House tlxe philosopher and the
artist and the teacher were left out of account, even though Bacon,
like the prudent Descartes, clung very ceremoniously to the rites of
the Christian church. For the “ordinances and rites” of Salomon’s
House there are two galleries. In one of tliese “we place patterns
and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inven-
tions: in the other we place die statues of all principal Inventors.
There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the
West Indies: also the Inventor of Ships: your monk that was the
Inventor of Ordnance and Gunpowder: the Inventor of Music: the
Inventor of Letters: the Inventor of Printing: the Inventor of obser-
vations by astronomy: the Inventor of Works in Metal: the Inventor
of Glass: the Inventor of Silk of the Worm: the Inventor of Wine:
the Inventor of Com and Bread: the Inventor of Sugars. ... For
upon every invention of value, we erect a statue to the Inventor
and give him a liberal and honorable reward.” This Salomon’s House,
as Bacon fancied it, was a combination of the Rockefeller Institute

CULTURAL PREPARATION

and the Deutsches Museum: there, if anywhere, was the means to-
wards the relief of man’s estate.

Observe this: there is little that is vague or fanciful in all these
conjectures about the new role to be played by science and the
machine. The general staff of science had worked out the strategy of
the campaign long before the commanders in the field had developed
a tactics capable of carrying out the attack in detail. Indeed, Usher
notes that in the seventeenth century invention was relatively feeble,
and the power of the technical imagination had far outstripped the
actual capacities of workmen and engineers. Leonardo, Andreae,
Campanella, Bacon, Hooke in his Micrographia and Glanvill in
his Scepsis Scientifica, wrote down in outline the specifications for
the new order: the use of science for the advancement of technics,
and the direction of technics toward the conquest of nature were the
burden of the whole effort. Bacon’s Salomon’s House, though for-
mulated after the actual founding of the Accademia Lynxei in Italy,
was the actual starting point of the Philosophical College that first
met in 1646 at the Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside, and in 1662 was
duly incorporated as the Royal Society of London for Improving
Natural Knowledge. This society had eight standing committees, the
first of which was to “consider and improve all mechanical inven-
tions.” The laboratories and technical museums of the tw'entieth cen-
tury existed first as a thought in the mind of this philosophical cour-
tier: nothing that we do or practice today would have surprised him.

So confident in the results of the new approach was Hooke that
he wrote: “There is nothing that lies within the power of human
wit (or which is far more effectual) of human industry which we
might not compass; we might not only hope for inventions to equalize
those of Copernicus, Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, and others, whose
names are almost lost, that were the inventors of Gunpowder, the
Seaman’s Compass, Printing, Etching, Graving, Microscopes, Etc.,
but multitudes that may far exceed them: for even those discovered
seem to have been the product of some such methods though but
imperfect; what may not be therefore expected from it if thoroughly
prosecuted? Talking and contention of Arguments would soon be
turned into labors; all the fine dreams and opinions and universal

58 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

metaphysical nature, which the luxury of subtil brains has devised,
would quickly vanish and give place to solid histories, experiments,
and works.”

The leading utopias of the time, Christianopolis, the City of the
Sun, to say nothing of Bacon’s fragment or Cyrano de Bergerac’s
minor works, all brood upon the possibility of utilizing the machine
to make the world more perfect: the machine was the substitute for
Plato’s justice, temperance, and courage, even as it was likewise
for the Christian ideals of grace and redemption. The machine came
forth as the new demiurge that was to create a new heaven and
a new earth: at the least, as a new Moses that was to lead a bar-
barous humanity into the promised land.

There had been premonitions of all this in the centuries before.
“I will now mention,” said Roger Bacon, “some of the wonderful
works of art and nature in which there is nothing of magic and which
magic could not perform. Instruments may be made by which the
largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with
greater velocity than if they were full of sailors. Chariots may be
constructed that will move with incredible rapidity without the help
of animals. Instruments of flying may be formed in which a man,
sitting at his ease and meditating in any subject, may beat the air
with his artificial wings after the manner of birds ... as also
machines which will enable men to walk at the bottom of seas or
rivers without ships.” And Leonardo de Vinci left behind him a list
of inventions and contrivances that reads like a synopsis of the present
industrial world.

But by the seventeenth century the note of confidence had in-
creased, and the practical impulse had become more universal and
urgent. The works of Porta, Cardan, Besson, Ramelli, and other
ingenious inventors, engineers, and mathematicians are a witness
both to increasing skill and to growing enthusiasm over technics it-
self. Schwenter in his Delassements Physico-Mathematiques ( 1636 )
pointed out how two individuals could communicate with each other
by means of magnetic needles. “To them that come after us,” said
Glanvill, “it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly to
remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey; and

CULTURAL PREPARATION 59

to confer at the distance of the Indies hy sympathetic conveyances
may he as usual in future times as by literary correspondence.”
Cyrano de Bergerac conceived the phonograph. Hooke observed that
it is “not impossible to hear a whisper a furlong’s distance, it having
been already done; and perhaps the nature of things would not make
it more impossible, although that furlong be ten times multiplied.”
Indeed, he even forecast the invention of artificial silk. And Glanvill
said again: “I doubt not posterity will find many things that are now
but rumors verified into practical realities. It may he that, some
ages hence, a voyage to the Southern tracts, yea, possibly to tlie
moon, will not he more strange than one to America. . . . The
restoration of grey hairs to juvenility and the renewing the exhausted
marrow may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning
of the now comparatively desert world into a paradise may not
improbably be effected from late agriculture.” ( 1661 )

Whatever was lacking in the outlook of the seventeenth century
it was not lack of faith in the imminent presence, the speedy develop-
ment, and the profound importance of the machine. Clock-making:
time-keeping: space-exploration: monastic regularity; bourgeois
order: technical devices: protestant inhibitions: magical explora-
tions: finally the magistral order, accuracy, and clarity of the
physical sciences themselves — all these separate activities, inconsid-
erable perhaps in themselves, had at last formed a complex social
and ideological network, capable of supporting the vast weight of
the machine and extending its operations still further. By the middle
of the eighteenth century the initial preparations were over and the
key inventions had been made. An army of natural philosophers,
rationalists, experimenters, mechanics, ingenious people, had assem-
bled who were clear as to their goal and confident as to their victory.
Before more than a streak of grey had appeared at the horizon’s rim,
they proclaimed the dawn and announced how wonderful it was: how
marvelous the new day would be. Actually, they were to announce
a shift in the seasons, perhaps a long cyclical change in the climate
itself.

CHAPTER IL

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION

1 ; Tlie Profile of Technics

The preparation for the machine that took place between the
tenth and the eighteenth century gave it a broad foundation and as-
sured its speedy and universal conquest throughout Western Civiliza-
tion. But in back of this lay the long development of technics itself:
the original exploration of the raw environment, the utilization of
objects shaped by nature — shells and stones and animal gut — for
tools and utensils: the development of fundamental industrial proc-
esses, digging, chipping, hammering, scraping, spinning, drying: the
deliberate shaping of specific tools as necessities pressed and as skill
increased.

Experimental sampling, as with edibles, happy accidents, as with
glass, true causal insight as with the fire-drill: all these played a
part in the transformation of our material environment and steadily
modified the possibilities of social life. If discovery comes first, as
it apparently does in the utilization of fire, in the use of meteoric
iron, in the employment of hard cutting edges such as shells, inven-
tion proper follows close at its heels: indeed, the age of inven-
tion is only another name for the age of man. If man is rarely found
in the “state of nature” it is only because nature is so constantly
modified by technics.

To sum up these earlier developments of technics, it may be use-
ful to associate them with the abstract scheme of the valley section:
the ideal profile of a complete mountain-and-river system. In a
figurative sense, civilization marches up and down the valley-section:

all the great historic cultures, with the partial exception of those

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 61

secluded maritime cultures in which the seas sometimes served in-
stead of a river, have thriven through the movement of men and
institutions and inventions and goods along the natural highway
of a great river: the Yellow River, the Tigris, the Nile, the Euphrates,
the Rhine, the Danube, the Thames. Against the primitive back-
grounds of the valley section are developed the earlier forms of
technics: within the cities, the processes of invention are quickened,
a multitude of new needs arises, the exigencies of close living and
of a limited food supply lead to fresh adaptations and ingenuities,
and in the very act of putting primitive conditions at a distance men
are forced to devise substitutes for the cruder artifacts which had
once ensured their survival.

Taking the purely schematic valley section in profile, one finds
toward the mountain top, where on the steeper slope the rocks perhaps
crop out, the quarry and the mine: almost from the dawn of history
itself man engages in these occupations. It is the survival, into our
own times, of the prototype of all economic activity: the stage of
directly seeking and picking and collecting: berries, funguses, stones,
shells, dead animals. Down to modem times, mining remained tech-
nically one of the crudest of occupations: the pick and the hammer
were its principal tools. But the derivative arts of mining steadily
developed in historic times: indeed the use of metals is the main
element that distinguishes the later crafts of Europe up to the tenth
century a.d. from the stone cultures that came before: smelting,
refining, smithing, casting, all increased the speed of production,
improved the forms of tools and weapons, and greatly added to their
strength and effectiveness. In the forest that stretches from the crown
of the mountain seaward the hunter stalks his game: his is possibly
the oldest deliberate technical operation of mankind for in their
origin the weapon and the tool are interchangeable. The simple ham-
merhead serves equally as a missile: the knife kills the game and cuts
it up: the ax may cut down a tree or slay an enemy. Now the hunter
survives by skill of arm and eye, now by physical strength, now by
the cunning contrivance of traps and pitfalls. In the pursuit of his
game he does not remain in the forest but follows wherever the
chase may lead him; a habit which often leads to conflicts and hos-

62 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tilities in the invaded areas: perhaps in the development of war as

an institutional routine.

Farther down the valley, where the little mountain torrents and
brooks gather together in a stream, which facilitates transportation,
is the realm of the primitive woodman: the wood chopper, the for-
ester, the millwright, the carpenter. He cuts down trees, he hollows
out wooden canoes, he contrives the bow which is perhaps the most
effective type of early prime mover, and he invents the fire drill, in
whose widened disc Renard sees the origin of the pulley and perhaps
of the wheel, to say nothing of the windlass. Tlie woodman’s ax is
the chief primitive tool of mankind: his beaverlike occupation —
which perhaps accidentally resulted in the human re-invention of the
bridge and the dam — is apparently the original form of modern
engineering; and the most important instruments of precision in the
transmission of motion and the shaping of materials came from
him : above all, the lathe.

Below the ideal forest line, becoming more visible with the ad-
vance of a settled culture, as the woodman’s ax opens up the clearings
and the seeds that are dropped in the sunny glades are nurtured
through the summer and grow with a new lushness — below the primi-
tive woodman lies the province of the herdsman and the peasant.
Goatherd, shepherd, cowherd, occupy the upland pastures or the
broad grasslands of the plain-plateaus in their first or final stages
of erosion. Spinning itself, the art by means of which frail filatal
elements are strengthened through twisting, is one of the earliest of
the great inventions, and may first have been applied to the sinews
of animals: thread and string were originally used where we should
now utilize them only in an emergency — as in fastening an ax-head
to a handle. But the spinning and weaving of fabrics for clothing,
for tents, or for rugs to serve as temporary floor in the tent, are the
work of the herdsman: they came in with the domestication of ani-
mals in the neolithic period, and some of the earliest forms of the
spindle and loom have remained in existence among primitive
peoples.

Below the more barren pastures, the peasant takes permanent
possession of the land and cultivates it. He expands into the heavier

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 63

river-bottom soils as his command over tools and domesticated ani-
mals grows, or as the struggle for existence becomes more keen: he
may even reach back into the hinterland and bring under cultivation
the potentially arable pasture. The farmer’s tools and machines are
relatively few: as with the herdsman, his inventive capacities are
expended directly, for the most part, upon the plants themselves in
their selection and breeding and perfection. His tools remain without
fundamental change throughout the greater part of recorded history:
the hoe, the mattock, the plow, the spade, and the scythe. But his
utensils and his utilities are many: the irrigation ditch, the cellar,
the storage-bin, the cistern, the well, and the permanent dwelling
house occupied throughout the year, belong to the peasant: partly out
of his need for defence and cooperative action grow the village and
the town. Finally, at the oceanside, plying in and out behind the
barrier beaches and the salt marshes, lives the fisherman: a sort of
aquatic hunter. The first fisherman to construct a weir possibly in-
vented the art of weaving: the net and the basket made out of the
reeds of the marshland certainly came out of this environment, and
the most important early mode of transport and communication, the
boat, was a direct product.

The order and security of an agricultural and pastoral civilization
was the critical improvement that came in with the neolithic period.
Out of that stability grew not merely the dwelling house and die per-
manent community but a cooperative economic and social life, per-
petuating its institutions by means of visible buildings and memorials
as well as by the imparted word. Into the special meeting-places that
arose more and more frequently in the areas of transition between
one phase of economic activity and another, the market grew up: in
certain kinds of goods, amber, obsidian, flint, and salt, trade over
wide areas developed at a very early period. With the exchange of
more finished kinds of goods went an exchange likewise of technologi-
cal skill and knowledge: in terms of our diagrammatic valley section,
special environments, special occupational types, special techniques
shifted over from one part to another and intermingled; the result
was a steady enrichment and increasing complication of the culture
itself and the technical heritage. Lacking impersonal methods of

64 TECHNICS AND CIYILIZATION

record, the transmission of craft-knowledge tended to create occupa-
tional castes. The conservation of skill by these means led to down-
right conservatism: the very refinements of traditional knowledge
served, perhaps, as a brake on invention.

The various elements in a civilization are never in complete
equilibrium: there is always a tug and pull of forces, and in particu-
lar, there are changes in the pressure exerted by the life-destroying
functions and the life-conserving ones. In tlie neolithic period, the
peasant and the herdsman were, it seems, uppermost: the dominant
ways of life were the outcome of agriculture, and the religion and
science of the day were directed towards a more perfect adjustment
of man to the actual earth from which he drew his nourishment.
Eventually these peasant civilizations succumbed to anti-vital forces
that came from two related points of the compass: on one hand from
trading, with its growth of an impersonal and abstract system of
relations bound together by a cash nexus: on the other from the
predatory tactics of the mobile hunters and shepherds, extending
their hunting grounds and their pastures or, at a more advanced
stage, their power to collect tribute and to rule. Only three great
cultures have a continuous history throughout the historic period:
the polite and pacific peasant cultures of India and China, and the
mainly urban culture of the Jews: the last two distinguished par-
ticularly for their practical intelligence, their rational morals, their
kindly manners, their cooperative and life-conserving institutions;
whereas the predominantly military forms of civilization have proved
self-destructive.

With the dawn of modem technics in Northern Europe one sees
these primitive types once more in their original character and their
typical habitats. The redifferentiation of occupations and crafts goes
on under our very eyes. The rulers of Europe once more are hunters
and fishers: from Norway to Naples their prowess in the chase alter-
nates with their conquest of men: one of their prime concerns when
they conquer a land is to establish their hunting rights and set aside
great parks as sacred to the game they pursue. When these hardy
warriors finally supplement the spear and the ax and the firebrand
with the carmon as a weapon of assault, the military arts become

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION

professionalized once more, and the support of war becomes one of
the principal burdens of a civil society. TTie primitive mining and the
primitive metallurgy goes on as it had existed for long in the past:
but presently the simple arts of the miner and the smith break up
into a score of specialized occupations. This process proceeds at an
accelerating speed as commerce expands and the demand for gold
and silver increases, as war becomes more mechanized and the de-
mand for armor, for artillery, and for the sinews of war expands.
So, too, the woodman appears in the forested areas, for much of
Europe had gone back into forest and grass: presently the sawyer,
the carpenter, the joiner, the turner, the wheelwright have become
specialized crafts. In the growing cities, from the eleventh century
on, these elementary occupations appear, differentiate, react upon
each other, interchange techniques and forms. Within a few hundred
years almost the entire drama of technics is re-enacted once more
and technics reaches a higher plane of general achievement than any
other civilization had known in the past — ^although in special depart-
ments it was again and again surpassed by the finer arts of the
East. If one takes a cross-section of technics in the Middle Ages one
has at hand most of tlie important elements derived from the past,
and the germ of most of the growth that is to take place in the
future. In the rear lies handicraft and the tool, supplemented by the
simple chemical processes of the farm: in the van stands the exact
arts and the machine and the new achievements in metallurgy and
glass-making. Some of the most characteristic instruments of medi-
eval technics, like the cross-bow, show in their form and workman-
ship the imprint of both the tool and the machine. Here, then, is a
central vantage point.

2: De Re Metallica

Quarrying and mining are the prime extractive occupations : with-
out stones and metals with sharp edges and resistant surfaces neither
weapons nor tools could have passed beyond a very crude shape
and a limited effectiveness — ^however ingeniously wood, shell and
bone may have been used by primitive man before he had mastered
stone. The first efficient tool seems to have been a stone held in the

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

human hand as a hammer: the German ■word for fist is die Faust,
and to this day the miner’s hammer is called ein Faustel.

Of all stones flint, because of its commonness in Northern Europe
and because of its breaking into sharp scalloped edges, was per-
haps the most important in the development of tools. With the aid
of other rocks, or of a pick-ax made of reindeer horn, the flint miner
extracted his stone, and hy patient effort shaped it to his needs: the
hammer itself had reached its present refinement of shape by the
late neolithic period. During a great span of primitive life the slow
perfection of stone tools was one of the principal marks of its
advancing civilization and its control over the environment: this
reached perhaps its highest point in the Big Stone culture, with its
capacity for cooperative industrial effort, as shown in the transporta-
tion of the great stones of its outdoor temples and astronomical
observatories, and in its relatively high degree of exact scientific
knowledge. In its latest period the use of clay for pottery made it
possible to preserve and store liquids, as well as to keep dried pro-
visions from moisture and mildew: another victory for the primitive
prospector who was learning to explore the eardi and adapt its non-
organic contents to his uses.

There is no sharp breach between grubbing, quarrying and mining.
The same outcrop that shows quartz may equally hold gold, and the
same stream that has clayey banks may disclose a gleam or two of
this precious metal — precious for primitive man not only because
of its rarity but because it is soft, malleable, ductile, non-oxidizing,
and may be worked without the use of fire. The use of gold and
amber and jade antedates the so-called age of metals: they were
prized for their rareness and their magical qualities, even more than
for what could be directly made of them. And the hunt for these
minerals had nothing whatever to do with extending the food-supply
or establishing creature comforts: man searched for precious stones,
as he cultivated flowers, because long before he had invented capital-
ism and mass production he had acquired more energy than he
needed for bare physical survival on the terms of his existing culture.

In contrast to the forethought and sober plodding of the peasant,
the work of the miner is the realm of random effort: irregular in

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 67

routine and uncertain in result. Neither the peasant nor the herds-
man can get rich quickly: the first clears a field or plants a row of
trees this year from which perhaps only his grandchildren will get
the full benefits. The rewards of agriculture are limited by the known
qualities of soil and seed and stock: cows do not calve more quickly
one year than another, nor do they have fifteen calves instead of one;
and for the seven years of abundance seven lean years, on the law
of averages, are pretty sure to follow. Luck for the peasant is usually
a negative fact: hail, wind, blight, rot. But the rewards of mining
may be sudden, and they may bear little relation, particularly in the
early stages of the industry, either to the technical ability of the
miner or the amount of labor he has expended. One assiduous pros-
pector may wear out his heart for years without finding a rich seam;
a newcomer in the same district may strike luck in the first morning
he goes to work. While certain mines, like the salt mines of the Salz-
kammergut, have been in existence for centuries, the occupation in
general is an unstable one.

Until the fifteenth century A.D., mining had perhaps made less
technical progress than any other art: the engineering skill that Rome
showed in aqueducts and roads did not extend in any degree to the
mines. Not merely had the art remained for thousands of years in a
primitive stage: but the occupation itself was one of the lowest in the
human scale. Apart from the lure of prospecting, no one entered
the mine in civilized states until relatively modern times except as a
prisoner of war, a criminal, a slave. Mining was not regarded as a
humane art: it was a form of punishment: it combined the terrors of
the dungeon with tlie physical exacerbation of the galley. The actual
work of mining, precisely because it was meant to be burdensome,
was not improved during the whole of antiquity, from the earliest
traces of it down to the fall of the Roman Empire. In general, not
merely may one say that free labor did not enter the mines until
the late Middle Ages; one must also remember that serfdom re-
mained here, in the mines of Scotland for example, a considerable
time after it had been abolished in agriculture. Possibly the myth
of the Golden Age was an expression of mankind’s sense of what it
had lost when it acquired control of the harder metals.

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
Was the social degradation of mining an accident, or does it lie in
the nature of things? Let us examine the occupation and its environ-
ment, as it existed through the greater part of history.

Except for surface mining, the art is pursued within the bowels
of the earth. The darkness is broken by the timid flare of a lamp or a
candle. Until the invention of the Davy safety lamp at the beginning
of the nineteenth century this fire might ignite the “mine-damp” and
exterminate by a single blast all who were within range: to this day,
the possibility of such an explosion remains, since sparks may occur
by accident even when electricity is used. Ground-water filters through
the seams and often threatens to flood the passages. Until modem
tools were invented, the passage itself was a cramped one: to extract
ore, children and women were employed from the earliest days to
crawl along the narrow tunnel, dragging a laden cart: women indeed
were so used as beasts of burden in English mines right up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. When primitive tools were not suf-
ficient to break up the ore or open a new face, it was often necessary
to light great fires in the difficult seams and then douse the stone with
cold water in order to make it crack: tlie steam was suffocating, and
the cracking might be dangerous: without strong shoring, whole gal-
leries might fall upon the workers, and frequently this happened.
The deeper down the seams went the greater the danger, the greater
the heat, the greater the mechanical difficulties. Among the hard and
brutal occupations of mankind, the only one that compares with old-
fashioned mining is modern trench warfare; and this should cause
no wonder: there is a direct connection. To this day, according to
Meeker, the mortality rate among miners from accidents is four times
as high as any other occupation.

If the use of metals came at a relatively late date in technics, the
reason is not far to seek. Metals, to begin with, usually exist as com-
pounds in ores; and the ores themselves are often inaccessible, hard
to find, and difficult to bring to the surface: even if they lie in the
open they are not easy to disengage. Such a common metal as zinc
was not discovered till the sixteenth century. The extraction of metals,
unlike the cutting down of trees or the digging of flint, requires high
temperatures over considerable periods. Even after the metals are

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION

extracted they are hard to work: the easiest is one of the most
precious, gold, while the hardest is the most useful, iron. In between
are tin, lead, copper, the latter of which can be worked cold only in
small masses or sheets. In short: the ores and metals are recalcitrant
materials: they evade discovery and they resist treatment. Only by
being softened do the metals respond: where there is metal there
must be fire.

Mining and refining and smithing invoke, by the nature of the
material dealt with, the ruthlessness of modern warfare: they place
a premium on brute force. In the technique of all these arts the
pounding operations are uppermost: the pick-ax, the sledge-hammer,
the ore-crusher, the stamping machine, the steam-hammer: one must
either melt or break the material in order to do anything with it.
The routine of the mine involves an unflinching assault upon the
physical environment: every stage in it is a magnification of power.
When power-machines came in on a large scale in the fourteenth-
century, it was in the military and the metallurgical arts that they
were, perhaps, most widely applied.

Let us now turn to the mining environment. The mine, to begin
with, is the first completely inorganic environment to be created and
lived in by man: far more inorganic than the giant city that Spengler
has used as a symbol of the last stages of mechanical desiccation.
Field and forest and stream and ocean are the environment of life:
the mine is the environment alone of ores, minerals, metals. Within
the subterranean rock, there is no life, not even bacteria or proto2oa,
except in so far as they may filter through with the ground water or
be introduced by man. The face of nature above the ground is good
to look upon, and the warmth of the sun stirs the blood of the
hunter on the track of game or the peasant in the field. Except for the
crystalline formations, the face of the mine is shapeless: no friendly
trees and beasts and clouds greet the eye. In hacking and digging
the contents of the earth, the miner has no eye for the forms of
things: what he sees is sheer matter, and until he gets to his vein it
is only an obstacle which he breaks through stubbornly and sends
up to the surface. If the miner sees shapes on the walls of his cavern,
as the candle flickers, they are only the monstrous distortions of his

70 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

pick or his arm: shapes of fear. Day has been abolished and the
rhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night production first
came into existence here. The miner must work by artificial light even
though the sun be shining outside; still further down in the seams,
he must work by artificial ventilation, too: a triumph of the “manu-
factured environment.”

In the underground passages and galleries of the mine there is
nothing to distract the miner: no pretty wench is passing in the field
with a basket on her head, whose proud breasts and flanks remind
him of his manhood: no rabbit scurries across his path to arouse
the hunter in him: no play of light on a distant river awakens his
reverie. Here is the environment of work: dogged, unremitting, con-
centrated work. It is a dark, a colorless, a tasteless, a perfumeless, as
well as a shapeless world: the leaden landscape of a perpetual winter.
Tlie masses and lumps of the ore itself, matter in its least organized
form, complete the picture. The mine is nothing less in fact than the
concrete model of the conceptual world which loas built up by the
physicists of the seventeenth ceraury.

There is a passage in Francis Bacon that makes one believe that
the alchemists had perhaps a glimpse of this fact. He says: “If then
it be true that Democritus said. That the truth of nature lieth hid in
certain deep mines and caves, and if it be true likewise that the
alchemists do so much inculcate, that Vulcan is a second nature, and
imitateth that dexterously and compendiously, which nature worketh
by ambages and length of time, it were good to divide natural philos-
ophy into the mine and the furnace; and to make two professions
or occupations of natural philosophers, some to be pioneers and
some smiths; some to dig, and some to refine and hammer.” Did the
mine acclimate us to the views of science? Did science in turn prepare
us to accept the products and the environment of the mine? The
matter is not susceptible to proof: but the logical relations, if not the
historical facts, are plain.

The practices of the mine do not remain below the ground: they
affect the miner himself, and they alter the surface of the earth.
Whatever could be said in defense of the art was said with great
pith and good sense by Dr. Georg Bauer (Agricola), the German

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION
physician and scientist who wrote various compendious treatises on
geology and mining at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He
had the honesty to sum up his opponents’ arguments in detail, even
if he could not successfully refute them: so that his hook De Re
Metallica remains to this day a classic text, like Vitruvius on Archi-
tecture.

First as to the miner himself: “The critics,” says Dr. Bauer, “say
further that mining is a perilous occupation to pursue because the
miners are sometimes killed by the pestilential air which they
breathe; sometimes their lungs rot away; sometimes the men perish
by being crushed in masses of rock; sometimes falling from ladders
into the shafts, they break their arms, legs, or necks. . . . But since
things like this rarely happen, and only so far as workmen are care-
less, they do not deter miners from carrying on their trade.” This
last sentence has a familiar note: it recalls the defenses of potters
and radium watch-dial manufacturers when the dangers of their
trades were pointed out. Dr. Bauer forgot only to note that though
coal miners are not particularly susceptible to tuberculosis, the cold-
ness and dampness, sometimes the downright wetness, predispose the
miner to rheumatism: an ill they share with rice cultivators. The
physical dangers of mining remain high; some are still unavoidable.

The animus of the miner’s technique is reflected in his treatment
of the landscape. Let Dr. Bauer again be our witness. “Besides this
the strongest argument of the detractors is that the fields are dev-
astated by mining operations, for which reason formerly Italians
were warned by law that no one should dig the earth for metals and
so injure their very fertile fields, their vineyards, and their olive
groves. Also they argue that the woods and groves are cut down,
for there is need of endless amount of wood for timbers, machines,
and the smelting of metals. And when the woods and groves are
felled, there are exterminate the beasts and birds, very many of
which furnish pleasant and agreeable food for man. Further, when
the ores are washed, the water which has been used poisons the
brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away.
Therefore the inhabitants of these regions, on account of the devas-
tation of their fields, woods, groves, brooks, and rivers, find great

72 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

dilEculty in procuring the necessaries of life, and by reason of the
destruction of the timber they are forced to a greater expense in
erecting buildings.”

There is no reason to go into Dr. Bauer’s lame reply: it happens
that the indictment still holds, and is an unanswerable one. One
must admit tlie devastation of mining, even if one is prepared to
justify the end. “A typical example of deforestation,” says a modern
writer on tlie subject, “is to be seen on the eastern slopes of the
Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Truckee Valley, where the cutting
of trees to provide timber for the deep mines of tlie Comstock left
the hillside exposed to erosion, so that today they are bleak, barren
and hideous. Most of the old mining regions tell the same tale, from
Lenares to Leadville, from Potosi to Porcupine.” The history of the
last four hundred years has underlined the truths of this indictment;
for what was only an incidental and local damage in Dr. Bauer’s time
became a widespread characteristic of Western Civilization just as
soon as it started in the eighteenth century to rest directly upon the
mine and its products, and to reflect, even in territories far from the
mine itself, tlie practices and ideals of the miner.

One further effect of this habitual destruction and disorganization
must be noted: its psychological reaction on the miner. Perhaps in-
evitably he has a low standard of living. Partly, this is the natural
effect of capitalist monopoly, often exerted and maintained by physi-
cal compulsion: but it exists even under relatively free conditions
and in “prosperous” times. Tlie explanation is not difficult: almost
any sight is brighter than the pit, almost any sound is sweeter than
the clang and rap of the hammer, almost any rough cabin, so long
as it keeps the water out, is a more hospitable place for an exhausted
man than the dark damp gallery of a mine. The miner, like the
soldier coming out of the trenches, wants a sudden relief and an
immediate departure from his routine. No less notorious than the
slatternly disorder of the mining town are the drinking and gambling
that go on in it: a necessary compensation for the daily toil- Released
from his routine, the miner takes a chance at cards or dice or whippet
racing, in the hope that it will bring the swift reward denied him in
the drudging efforts of the mine itself. The heroism of the miner is

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 73

genuine: hence his simple animal poise: his profound personal pride
and self-respect. But the brutalization is also inevitably there.

Now, the characteristic methods of mining do not stop at the
pithead: they go on, more or less, in all the accessory occupations.
Here is the domain, in northern mythology, of the gnomes and the
brownies: the cunning little people who know how to use the bellows,
the forge, tlie hammer and the anvil. They, too, live in the depths
of the mountains, and there is something a little inhuman about them:
they tend to be spiteful and tricky. Shall we set this characterization
down to the fear and mistrust of neolithic peoples for those who
had mastered the art of working in metals? Perhaps: at all events
one notes that in Hindu and Greek mythology the same general judg-
ment prevails as in the North. While Prometheus, who stole the fire
from heaven, is a hero, Hephaestus, the blacksmith, is lame and he
is the sport and butt of the other gods despite his usefulness.

Usually pocketed in the mountains, the mine, the furnace, and the
forge have remained a little off the track of civilization: isolation and
monotony add to the defects of the activities themselves. In an old
industrial domain, like the Rhine Valley, dedicated to industry since
the days of the Romans and refined by the technical and civil ad-
vances of the whole community, the direct effect of the miner’s cul-
ture may be greatly ameliorated: this is true in the Essen district
today, thanks to the original leadership of a Krupp and the later
planning of a Schmidt. But taking mining regions as a whole, they
are the very image of backwardness, isolation, raw animosities and
lethal struggles. From the Rand to the Klondike, from the coal mines
of South Wales to those of West Virginia, from the modern iron
mines of Minnesota to the ancient silver mines of Greece, barbarism
colors the entire picture.

Because of their urban situation and a more humanized rural
environment, the molder and the smith have often escaped this
influence: goldsmithing has always been allied with jewelry and
women’s ornaments, but even in the early Renascence ironwork of
Italy and Germany, for example, in the locks and bands of chests
as well as in the delicate traceries of railings and brackets, there is
a grace and ease that point directly to a more pleasant life. In the

74 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

main, however, the mining and metallurgical arts were outside the
social scheme of both classic and gothic civilization. That fact proved
a sinister one as soon as the methods and ideals of mining became
the chief pattern for industrial effort throughout the Western World.
Mine: blast: dump: crush: extract: exhaust — ^there was indeed some-
thing devilish and sinister about the whole business. Life flourishes
finally only in an environment of the living.

3: Mining and Modern Capitalism

More closely than any other industry, mining was bound up with
the first development of modem capitalism. By the sixteenth century
it had definitely set the pattern for capitalist exploitation.

When mining was undertaken by free men in the fourteenth cen-
tury in Germany the working of tlie mine was a simple partnership
on a share basis. The miners themselves were often ne’er-do-wells
and bankrupts who had seen better days. Partly abetted no doubt
by this very application of free labor, tliere was a rapid advance-
ment in technique in the German mines: by the sixteenth century
those in Saxony led Europe, and German miners were imported into
other countries, like England, to improve their practices.

The deepening of the mines, the extension of the operations to new
fields, the application of complicated machinery for pumping water,
hauling ore, and ventilating the mine, and the further application
of waterpower to work the bellows in the new furnaces — all these
improvements called for more capital than the original workei's pos-
sessed. This led to the admission of partners who contributed money
instead of work: absentee ownership: and this in turn led to a
gradual expropriation of the owner-workers and the reduction of
tlieir share of the profits to the status of mere wages. This capitalistic
development was further stimulated by reckless speculation in mining
shares which took place as early as the fifteenth century: the local
landlords and the merchants in the nearer cities eagerly followed
this new gamble. If the mining industry in Dr. Bauer’s day showed
many of the modem improvements in industrial organization — ^the
triple shift, the eight hour day, the existence of guilds in the various
metallurgical industries for social intercourse, charitable self-help

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 75

and insurance — it also showed, as the result of capitalist pressure,
the characteristic features of nineteenth century industry throughout
the world: the division of classes, the use of the strike as a weapon
of defence, the bitter class war, and finally the extinction of the
guilds’ power by a combination of mine-owners and the feudal no-
bility during the so-called Peasants’ War of 1525.

The result of that conflict was to abolish the cooperative guild
basis of the mining industry, which had characterized its technical
resurrection in Germany, and to place it on a free basis — ^that is, a
basis of untrammeled acquisitiveness and class domination by the
shareholders and directors, no longer bound to respect any of the
humane regulations that had been developed by medieval society
as measures of social protection. Even the serf had the safeguard
of custom and the elementary security of the land itself: the miner
and the iron-worker at the furnace was a free — ^that is, an unpro-
tected — ^worker: the forerunner of the disinherited wage-worker of
the nineteenth century. The most fimdamental industry of the
machine technics had known only for a moment in its history the
sanctions and protections and humanities of the guild system: it
stepped almost directly from the inhuman exploitation of chattel
slavery to the hardly less inhuman exploitation of wage slavery. And
wherever it went, the degradation of the worker followed.

But in still another way mining was an important agent of cap-
italism. The great need of commercial enterprise in the fifteenth
century was for a sound but expansible currency, and for capital
to provide the necessary capital goods — ^boats, mills, mine-shafts,
docks, cranes — for industry. The mines of Europe began to supply
this need even before the mines of Mexico and Peru. Sombart calcu-
lates that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries German mining
earned as much in ten years as trade in the old style was able to
accomplish in a hundred. As two of the greatest fortunes of modem
times have been founded upon monopolies of petroleum and alu-
minum, so the great fortune of the Fuggers in the sixteenth century
was founded upon the silver and lead mines of Styria and the Tyrol
and Spain. The heaping up of such fortunes was part of a cycle we
have witnessed with appropriate changes in our own time.

76 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

First: improvements in the technique of warfare, especially the
rapid growth of the artillery arm, increased the consumption of iron:
this led to new demands upon the mine. In order to finance the ever
more costly equipment and maintenance of the new paid soldiery,
the rulers of Europe had recourse to the financier. As security for
the loan, the lender took over the royal mines. The development of
the mines themselves then became a respectable avenue of financial
enterprise, with returns that compared favorably with the usurious
and generally unpayable interest. Spurred by the unpaid notes, the
rulers were in turn driven to new conquests or to the exploitation of
remote territories: and so the cycle began over again. War, mechani-
zation, mining, and finance played into each otlier’s hands. Mining
was the key industry that furnished the sinews of war and increased
the metallic contents of the original capital hoard, the war-chest: on
the other hand, it furthered the industrialization of arms, and en-
riched the financier by both processes. The uncertainly of both war-
fare and mining increased the possibilities for speculative gains:
this provided a rich broth for the bacteria of finance to thrive in.

Finally, it is possible that the animus of the miner had still another
effect on the development of capitalism. This was in the notion that
economic value had a relation to the quantity of brute work done
and to the scarcity of the product: in the calculus of cost, these
emerged as the principal elements. The rarity of gold, rubies, dia-
monds: the gross work that must be done to get iron out of the earth
and ready for the rolling mill — ^these tended to be the criteria of
economic value all through this civilization. But real values do not
derive from either rarity or crude manpower. It is not rarity that
gives the air its power to sustain life, nor is it the human work done
that gives milk or bananas their nourishment. In comparison with
the effects of chemical action and the sun’s rays the human contribu-
tion is a small one. Genuine value lies in the power to sustain or
enrich life: a glass bead may be more valuable than a diamond, a
deal table more valuable esthetically than the most tortuously carved
one, and the juice of a lemon may be more valuable on a long ocean
voyage than a hundred pounds of meat without it. The value lies
directly in the life-function: not in its origin, its rarity, or in the

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 77

work done by human agents. The miner’s notion of value, like the
financier’s, tends to be a purely abstract and quantitative one. Does
the defect arise out of the fact that every other type of primitive
environment contains food, something that may be immediately trans-
lated into life — ^game, berries, mushrooms, maple-sap, nuts, sheep,
corn, fish — ^while the miner’s environment alone is — salt and sac-
charin aside — not only completely inorganic but completely inedible?
The miner works, not for love or for nourishment, but to “make his
pile.” The classic curse of Midas became perhaps the dominant
characteristic of the modern machine: whatever it touched was turned
to gold and iron, and the machine was permitted to exist only where
gold and iron could serve as foundation.

4: The Primitive Engineer

The rational conquest of the environment by means of machines
is fundamentally the work of the woodman. In part, the explanation
of his success can be discovered in terms of the material he uses.
For wood, beyond any other natural material, lends itself to manipu-
lation: right down to the nineteenth century it had a place in civili-
zation that the metals themselves were to assume only after that point.

In the forests of the temperate and sub-arctic zones, which covered
the greater part of Western Europe from hilltop to riverbottom, wood
was of course the most common and visible part of the environment.
While the digging of stones was a laborious business, once the stone
ax was shaped the cutting down of trees became a relatively easy
task. What other object in nature has the length and cross-section of
the tree? What other kind of material presents its characteristic prop-
erties in such a large assortment of sizes: what other kind can be split
and split again with the simplest tools — ^the wedge and the mallet?
What other common material can both be broken into definite planes
and carved and shaped across those planes? The sedimentary rocks,
which most nearly attain to the same qualities, are poor substitutes
for wood. Unlike ores, one can cut down wood without the aid of
fire. Using fire locally one can hollow out an enormous log and
turn it into a canoe by charring the wood and scraping out with
a primitive gouge or chisel. Down to modern times the solid trunk

78 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of the tree was used in this primitive fashion : one of Dtirer’s engrav-
ings shows a man hollowing out a gigantic log; and bowls and tubs
and vats and troughs and benches were long made of single blocks
close to the natural shape.

Wood, different again from stone, has exceptional qualities for
transport: the trimmed logs may be rolled over the ground, and
because wood floats, it can be transported over long distances by
means of water even before boats are built: an unrivalled advantage.
The building of neolithic villages on wooden piles over the waters
of lakes was one of the surest witnesses to the advance of civilization:
wood delivered man from servitude to the cave and to the cold earth
itself. Thanks to the lightness and mobility of this material, as well
as to its wide distribution, one finds the products of the woodman
not merely in llie uplands but down by the open sea. In the marsh-
lands of the north coastal area in Europe, one finds the woodman
sinking his piles and building his villages — ^using his logs and his
mats of twigs and branches to serve as bulwark against the invading
ocean and to push it back. For thousands of years wood alone made
navigation possible.

Physically speaking, wood has the qualities of both stone and
metal: stronger in cross section than is stone, wood resembles steel
in its physical properties: its relatively high tensile and compressive
strength, together with its elasticity. Stone is a mass: but wood, by
its nature, is already a structure. The difference in toughness, tensile
strength, weight, and permeability of various species of wood, from
pine to hornbeam, from cedar to teak, give wood a natural range
of adaptability to various purposes that is matched in metals only
as a result of a long evolution of metallurgical skill: lead, tin,
copper, gold, and their alloys, the original assortment, offered a
meagre choice of possibilities, and down to the end of the nineteenth
century wood presented a greater variety. Since wood can be planed,
sawed, turned, carved, split, sliced, and even softened and bent or
cast, it is the most responsive of all materials to craftsmanship: it
lends itself to the greatest variety of techniques. But in its natural
state wood keeps the shape of the tree and retains its structure: and
the original shape of the wood suggests appropriate tools and adap-

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 79

tations of form. The curve of the branch forms the bracket, the forked
stick forms the handle and the primitive type of plow.

Finally, wood is combustible; and at the beginning that fact was
more important and more favorable to human development than the
fire-resistance of other materials. For fire was obviously man’s
greatest primitive achievement in manipulating his environment as
a whole: the utilization of fire raised him a whole plane above his
nearest sub-human contemporaries. Wherever he could gather a few
dried sticks, he could have a hearth and an altar: the germs of social
life and the possibility of free thought and contemplation. Long
before coal was dug or peat and dung dried, wood was man’s chief
source of energy, beyond the food he ate or the sun that warmed
him: long after power machines were invented wood continued to
be used for fuel, in the first steamboats and railroads of America
and Russia.

Wood, then, was the most various, the most shapeable, the most
serviceable of all the materials that man has employed in his tech-
nology: even stone was at best an accessory. Wood gave man his
preparatory training in the technics of both stone and metal: small
wonder that he was faithful to it when he began to translate his
wooden temples into stone. And the cunning of the woodman is at
the base of the most important post-neolithic achievements in the
development of the machine. Take away wood, and one takes away
literally the props of modern technics.

The place of the woodman in technical development has rarely
been appreciated; but his work is in fact almost synonymous with
power production and industrialization. He is not merely the wood-
cutter who thins out the forest and provides fuel: he is not merely
the charcoal burner who converts the wood into the most common
and effective form of fuel, and so makes possible advances in metal-
lurgy: he is, together with the miner and the smith, the primitive form
of engineer; and without his skills the work of the miner and the
mason would be difficult, and any great advance in their arts would
have been impossible. It is the wooden shoring that makes possible
the deep tunnel of the mine, even as it is the scantling and centering
that make possible the lofty arch of the cathedral or the wide span

80 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of the stone bridge. It was the woodman who developed the wheel:
the potter’s wheel, the cart-wheel, the water-wheel, the spinning-
wheel, and above all, the greatest of machine-tools, the lathe. If the
boat and the cart are the woodman’s supreme contribution to trans-
port, the barrel, with its skilful use of compression and tension to
achieve water-tightness is one of his most ingenious utensils: a great
advance in strength and lightness over clay containers.

As for the wheel-and-axle itself, so important is it that Reuleaux
and others have even said that the technical advance that characterizes
specifically the modem age is that from reciprocating motions to
rotary motions. Without a machine for accurately turning cylinders,
screws, pistons, boring instruments, it would be impossible to create
further instruments of precision: the machine-tool makes the modern
machine possible. Tlie lathe was the woodman’s decisive contribution
to the development of machines. First recorded among the Greeks,
the primitive form of the lathe consisted of two fixed parts which
hold the spindles that turn the wood. The spindle is wound up
by hand and rotated by release of the bent sapling to which the
wound cord is attached; the turner holds a chisel or gouge against
the rotating wood which, if accurately centered, becomes a true
cylinder or some modification of the cylinder. In this crude form the
lathe is still used — or was fifteen years ago — in the Chiltem Hills
in England: good enough to produce chair-legs shaped to pattern for
the market. As an instrument of fair precision, the lathe existed long
before its parts were cast in metal, before the crude form of power
was converted into a foot-treadle or an electric motor, before the
stock was made moveable or the adjustable slide-rest to steady the
chisel was invented. The final transformation of the lathe into a
metal instrument of exquisite accuracy awaited the eighteenth cen-
tury: Maudslay in England is often given the credit for it. But in
essentials, all the important parts had been worked out by the wood-
man; while the foot-treadle actually gave Watt the model he needed
for translating reciprocating motion into rotary motion in his steam-
engine.

The specific later contributions of the woodman to the machine
will be taken up in discussing the eotechnic economy. Enough to

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 81

point out here the role of the woodman as engineer: building dams,
locks, mills, building mill-wheels, controlling the flow of water.
Serving directly the needs of the peasant, the woodman often merged
with him. Environmentally, however, he was caught between two
movements that have always threatened and sometimes painfully
narrowed the realm he has reigned over. One was the demand of
the farmer for more arable land: this converted to mixed farming
soils more fitted for tree culture. In France, this has gone on so
far that the remaining trees may be merely a small clump or a row
silhouetted against the sky: in Spain and other parts of the Mediter-
ranean it has resulted not merely in deforestation hut serious soil
erosion: the same curse afflicts the seat of even more ancient civiliza-
tions, like that of China. (This evil has now been remedied in the
State of New York by the purchase and reforestation of the marginal
agricultural lands.)

From the other side of our typical valley section came pressure
from the miner and the glassmaker. By the seventeenth century the
marvellous oak forests of England had already been sacrificed to the
iron-maker: so serious was the shortage that the Admiralty under
Sir John Evelyn was forced to pursue a vigorous policy of reforesta-
tion in order to have enough timber for the Royal Navy. The con-
tinued attack upon the woodman’s environment has led to his expul-
sion to remoter areas — ^to the birch and fir forests of North Russia
and Scandinavia, to the Sierras and Rockies of America. So imperi-
ous became the commercial demand, so authoritative became the
miner’s methods that forest-cutting was reduced during the nineteenth
century to timber-mining: today whole forests are slaughtered every
week to supply the presses of the Sunday newspapers alone.
But wood-culture and wood-technics, which survived through the
age of metals, are likely also to endure through the age of synthetic
compounds: for wood itself is nature’s cheaper model for these
materials.

5: From Game-Hunt to Man-Hunt

Perhaps the most positive influence in the development of the
machine has been that of the soldier: in back of it lies the long

82 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

development of the primitive hunter. Originally the call of the hunter
for weapons was an effort to increase the food-supply: hence the
invention and improvement of arrowheads, spears, slings, and knives
from the earliest dawn of technics onward- The projectile and the
hand-weapon were the two special lines of this development: and
while the bow was perhaps the most effective weapon devised before
the modern gun, since it had both range and accuracy, the sharpening
of edges with the introduction of bronze and iron was scarcely less
important. Shock and fire still remain among the chief tactical
measures of warfare.

If the miner’s task is non-organic the hunter’s is anti-vital: he is
a beast of prey, and the needs of his appetite as well as the excite-
ment of the chase cause him to inhibit every other reaction — ^pity or
esthetic pleasure — in the act of killing. The herdsman domesticates
animals and in turn is domesticated by them: their protection and
their nurture, in itself the outcome no doubt of man’s prolongation
of infancy and his more tender care of the young and helpless, bring
out his most humane instincts, while the peasant learns to extend his
sympathies beyond the boundaries of the animal kingdom. The daily
lessons of crop and herd are lessons in co-operation and solidarity
and the selective nurture of life. Even when the farmer kills, extirpat-
ing the rat or pulling out the weed, his activity is directed toward
the preservation of the higher forms of life as related to human ends.

But the hunter can have no respect for life as such. He has none
of the responsibilities which are preliminary to the farmer’s slaugh-
ter of his cattle. Trained in the use of the weapon, killing becomes
his main business. Shaken by insecurity and fear, the hunter attacks
not merely the game but other hunters: living things are for him
potential meat, potential skins, potential enemies, potential trophies.
This predatory mode of life, deeply ingrained by man’s primordial
efforts to survive bare-handed in a hostile world, did not unfor-
tunately die out with the success of agriculture: in the migrations of
peoples it tended to direct their animus against other groups, par-
ticularly when animals were lacking and the food-supply was dubi-
ous, and eventually the trophies of the chase assumed symbolic

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION

forms: the treasures of the temple or the palace became the object
of attack.

The advance in the “arts of peace” did not in itself lead to
peace: on the contrary, the improvement of weapons and the repres-
sion of naive hostilities under the forms of organized life, tended
to make war itself more savage. Unarmed hands or feet are relatively
innocent: their range is limited, their efEectiveness is low. It is with
the collective organization and regimentation of the army that the
conflicts between men have reached heights of bestiality and terrorism
that primitive peoples, with their merely post-mortem cannibalism,
might well envy.

Finding the instruments of warfare more effective, men sought
new occasions for their use. Robbery is perhaps the oldest of labor-
saving devices, and war vies with magic in its efforts to get some-
thing for nothing — ^to obtain women without possessing personal
charm, to achieve power without possessing intelligence, and to enjoy
the rewards of consecutive and tedious labor without having lifted
a finger in work or learnt a single useful skill. Lured by these pos-
sibilities, the hunter as civilization advances turns himself to sys-
tematic conquest: he seeks slaves, loot, power, and he founds the
political state in order to ensure and regulate the annual tribute —
enforcing, in return, a necessary modicum of order.

While pottery, basketwork, wine-making, grain-growing show only
superficial improvements from neolithic times onward, the improve-
ment of the instruments of war has been constant. The three-field
system lingered in British agriculture down to the eighteenth century
while the tools used in the remoter areas of England would have
been laughed at by a Roman farmer: but the shambling peasant with
his pruning hook or his wooden club had meanwhile been replaced
by the bowman and the spearman, these had given way to the musket-
eer, the musketeer had been turned into a smart, mechanically re-
sponsive infantryman, and the musket itself had become more deadly
in close fighting by means of the bayonet, and the bayonet in turn
had become more eificient by means of drill and mass tactics, and
finally, all the arms of the service had been progressively co-or-
dinated with the most deadly and decisive arm: the artillery. A

84 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

triumph of mechanical improvement: a triumph of regimentation.
If the invention of the mechanical clock heralded the new will-to-
order, the use of cannon in the fourteenth century enlarged the will-
to-power; and the machine as we know it represents the convergence
and systematic embodiment of these two prime elements.

The regimentation of modern warfare carries much farther than
the actual discipline of the army itself. From rank to rank passes
the word of command: that passage would be impeded if, instead
of mechanical obedience, it met with a more active and participating
form of adjustment, involving a knowledge of how and why and
wherefore and for whom and to what end: the commanders of the
sixteenth century discovered that effectiveness in mass-fighting in-
creased in proportion as the individual soldier was reduced to a
power-unit and trained to be an automaton. The weapon, even when
it is not used to inflict death, is nevertheless a means for enforcing
a pattern of human behavior which would not be accepted unless
the alternative were physical mutilation or death: it is, in short,
a means of creating a dehumanized response in the enemy or the
victim.

The general indoctrination of soldierly habits of thought in the
seventeenth century was, it seems probable, a great psychological
aid to the spread of machine industrialism. In terms of the barracks,
the routine of the factory seemed tolerable and natural. The spread
of conscription and volunteer militia forces throughout the Western
World after the French Revolution made army and factory, so far
as their social effects went, almost interchangeable terms. And the
complacent characterizations of the First World War, namely that
it was a large-scale industrial operation, has also a meaning in
reverse: modem industrialism may equally well be termed a large-
scale military operation.

Observe the enormous increase in the army as a power unit: the
power was multiplied by the use of guns and cannon, by the increase
in the size and range of cannon, by the multiplication of the number
of men put in the field. The first giant cannon on record had a barrel
over three and a half meters long, it weighed over 4500 kilograms:
it appeared in Austria in 1404. Not merely did heavy industry

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 85

slop in response to war long before it had any contributions of
srtance to make to the arts of peace: but the quantification of
the concentration upon power as an end in itself, proceeded as
dly in this department as in trade. In back of that was a growing
empt for life: for life in its variety, its individuality, its natural
rgence and exuberance. With the increase in the effectiveness
weapons, came likewise a growing sense of superiority in the
ier himself: his strength, his death-dealing properties had been
btened by technological advance. With a mere pull of the trigger,
Duld annihilate an enemy: that was a triumph of natural magic.

Warfare and Invention

ithin the domain of warfare there has been no psychological
ranee to murderous invention, except that due to lethargy and
ine: no limits to invention suggest themselves,
eals of humanity come, so to say, from other parts of the
ronment: the herdsman or the caravaneer brooding under the
— a Moses, a David, a St. Paul — or the city bred man, observing
ily the conditions under which men may live well together — a
ucius, a Socrates, a Jesus, bring into society the notions of peace
friendly cooperation as a higher moral expression than the sub-
3n of other men. Often this feeling, as in St. Francis and the
lu sages, extends to the entire world of living nature. Luther, it
ue, was a miner’s son; hut his career proves the point rather
weakens it: he was actively on the side of the knights and
ers when they ferociously put down the poor peasants who
d to challenge them.

part from the savage inroads of Tartars, Huns, Turks, it was
intil the machine culture became dominant that the doctrine of
immeled power was, practically speaking, unchallenged. Though
ardo wasted much of his valuable time in serving warlike princes
in devising ingenious military weapons, he was still sufficiently
r the restraint of humane ideals to draw the line somewhere,
oppressed the invention of the submarine boat because he felt,

; explained in his notebook, it was too satanic to be placed in
ands of unregenerate men. One by one the invention of machines

86 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

and the growing belief in abstract power removed these scruples,
withdrew these safeguards. Even chivalry died in the unequal con-
tests and the triumphant slaughter of the poorly armed barbarians
the European encountered in his post-Columbian spread throughout
the planet.

Ho%v far shall one go back in demonstrating the fact that war has
been pexhaps the chief propagator of the machine? Shall it be to the
poison-arrow or the poison-pellet? This was the forerunner of poison-
gas: while not merely was poison gas itself a natural product of the
mine, but the development of gas masks to combat it took place in
the mine before they were used on the battlefield. Shall it be to the
armed chariot with the scythes that revolved with its movement,
mowing down the foot-soldiers? That was the forerunner of the
modern tank, while the tank itself, impelled by hand power furnished
by the occupants, was designed as early as 1558 by a German. Shall
it be to the use of burning petroleum and Greek fire, the first of
which was used considerably before the Christian era? Here was the
embryo of the more mobile and effective flame-thrower of the last
war. Shall it be to the earliest high-powered engine that hurled
stones and Javelins invented apparently under Dionysius of Syracuse
and used by him in his expedition against the Carthaginians in
397 B.c.? In the hands of the Romans the catapults could throw
stones weighing around 57 pounds a distance of 400 to 500 yards,
while their hallistas, which were enormous wooden cross-bows for
shooting stones, were accurate at even greater distances: with these
instruments of precision Roman society was closer to the machine
than in its aqueducts and baths. The swordsmiths of Damascus,
Toledo, Milan, were noted both for their refined metallurgy and
their skill in manufacturing armament: forerunners of Krupp and
Creuseot. Even the utilization of the physical sciences for more
effective warfare was an early development: Archimedes, the story
goes, concentrated the sun’s rays by means of mirrors on the sails
of the enemy’s fleet in Syracuse and burned the boats up. Ctesibius,
one of the foremost scientists of Alexandria, invented a steam cannon:
Leonardo designed another. And when the Jesuit father, Francesco
Lana-Terzi, in 1670 projected a vacuum dirigible balloon, he

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 87

emphasized its utility m warfare. In short the partnership between
the soldier, the miner, the technician, and the scientist is an ancient
one. To look upon the horrors of modern warfare as the accidental
result of a fundamentally innocent and peaceful technical develop-
ment is to forget the elementary facts of the machine’s history.

In the development of the military arts the soldier has of course
borrowed freely from other branches of technics: the more mobile
fighting arms, the cavalry and the fleet, come respectively from the
pastoral and the fishing occupations: static warfare, from the trenches
of the Roman castra to the heavy masonry fortifications of the cities,
is a product of the peasant — ^the Roman soldier, indeed, conquered
through his spade as well as his sword — ^while the wooden instru-
ments of siege, the ram, the ballista, the scaling ladder, the moving-
tower, the catapult, all plainly bear the stamp of the woodman. But
the most important fact about modem warfare is the steady increase
of mechanization from the fourteenth century onward: here mili-
tarism forced the pace and cleared a straight path to the development
of modern large-scale standardized industry.

To recapitulate: the first great advance came through the intro-
duction of gunpowder in Western Europe: it had already been used
in the East. In the early thirteen hundreds came the first cannon — ■
or firepots — ^and then at a much slower pace came the hand-weapons,
the pistol and the musket. Early in this development multiple firing
was conceived, and the organ gun, the first machine-gun, was in-
vented.

The effect of firearms upon technics was three-fold. To begin with,
they necessitated the large scale use of iron, both for the guns them-
selves and for cannon-balls. While the development of armor called
forth the skill of the smith, the multiplication of cannon demanded
cooperative manufacture on a much larger scale: the old fashioned
methods of handicraft were no longer adequate. Because of the de-
structions of the forest, experiments were made in the use of coal
in the iron furnaces, from the seventeenth century onwards, and when,
a century later, the problem was finally solved by Abraham Darby
in England, coal became a key to military as well as to the new
industrial power. In France, the first blast furnaces were not built

88 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

lill about 1550, and at the end of the century France had thirteen
foundries, all devoted to the manufacture of cannon — ^the only other
important article being scythes.

Second: the gun was the starting point of a new type of power
machine: it was, mechanically speaking, a one cylinder internal
combustion engine: the first form of the modem gasoline engine, and
some of the early experiments in using explosive mixtures in motors
sought to employ powder rather than a liquid fuel. Because of the
accuracy and effectiveness of tlie new projectiles, these machines had
still another result: they were responsible for the development of the
art of heavy fortification, with elaborate outworks, moats, and
salients, the latter so arranged that any one bastion could come to
the aid of another by means of cross-fire. The business of defence
became complicated in proportion as the tactics of offence became
more deadly; road-building, canal-building, pontoon-building,
bridge-building became necessary adjuncts of warfare. Leonardo,
typically, offered his services to the Duke of Milan, not merely to
design ordnance, but to conduct all these engineering operations. In
short: war established a new type of industrial director who was not
a mason or a smith or a master craftsman — ^the military engineer.
In the prosecution of war, the military engineer combined originally
all the offices of tlie civil, the mechanical, and the mining engineer:
offices that did not begin to be fully differentiated until the eighteenth
century. It was to the Italian military engineers from the fifteenth
century on that the machine owed a debt quite as high as it did to
the ingenious British inventors of James Watt’s period.

In die seventeenth century, thanks to the skill of the great Vauban,
the arts of military offence and defence had almost reached a stale-
mate: Vauban’s forts were impregnable, against every form of attack
except that which he himself finally devised. How storm these solid
masses of stone? Artillery was of dubious value, since it worked
in both directions: the only avenue open was to call in the miner,
whose business it is to overcome stone. In accordance with Vauban’s
suggestion, troops of engineers, called sappers, were created in 1671,
and two years later the first company of miners was raised. The
stalemate was over: open warfare again became necessary and pos-

AGENTS Of MECHANIZATION 89

sible, and it was through the invention of the bayonet, which took
place between 1680 and 1700, that the finer intimacies of personal
murder were restored to this art.

If the cannon was the first of the modern space-annihilating de-
vices, by means of which man was enabled to express himself at a
distance, the semaphore telegraph (first used in war) was perhaps
the second: by the end of the eighteenth century an effective system
had been installed in France, and a similar one was projected for the
American railroad service before Morse opportunely invented the
electric telegraph. At every stage in its modern development it was
war rather than industry and trade that showed in complete outline
the main features that characterize the machine. The topographic
survey, the use of maps, the plan of campaign — ^long before business
men devised organization charts and sales charts — ^the coordination
of transport, supply, and production [mutilation and destruction],
the broad divisions of labor between cavalry, infantry, and artillery,
and the division of the process of production between each of these
branches; finally, the distinction of function between staff and field
activities — all these characteristics put warfare far in advance of
competitive business and handicraft with their petty, empirical and
short-sighted methods of preparation and operation. The army is
in fact the ideal form toward which a purely mechanical system of
industry must tend. The utopian writers of the nineteenth century
like Bellamy and Cabet, who accepted this fact, were more realistic
than the business men who sneered at their ^‘idealism.” But one may
doubt whether the outcome was an ideal one.

7 : Military Mass-Production

By the seventeenth century, before iron had begun to be used on
a great scale in any of the other industrial arts, Colbert had created
arms factories in France, Gustavus Adolphus had done likewise in
Sweden, and in Russia, as early as Peter the Great, there were as
many as 683 workers in a single factory. There were isolated ex-
amples of large-scale mills and factories, even before that of the
famous Jack of Newbury in England: but the most impressive series
was the arms factories. Within these factories, the division of labor

90 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

was established and the grinding and polishing machinery was
worked by water-power: so that Sombart well observed that Adam
Smith had done better to have taken arms, rather than pin-making,
as an example of the modern productive process with all the econ-
omies of specialization and concentration.

The pressure of military demand not merely hastened factory
organization at the beginning: it has remained persistent throughout
its entire development. As warfare increased in scope and larger
armies were brought into the field, their equipment became a much
heavier task. And as their tactics became mechanized, the instruments
needed to make their movements precise and well-timed were neces-
sarily reduced to uniformity too. Hence along with factory organiza-
tion there came standardization on a larger scale than was to be
found in any other department of technics except perhaps printing.

The standardization and mass production of muskets came at the
end of the eighteenth century: in 1785 Le Blanc in France produced
muskets with interchangeable parts, a great innovation in production,
and the type of all future mechanical design. (Up to this time there
had been no uniformity in even the minor elements like screws and
threads.) In 1800 Eli Wliitney, who had obtained a contract from
the United States Government to produce arms in similar fashion
turned out a similar standardized weapon in his new factory at
Whitneyville. “The technique of interchangeable part manufacture,”
as Usher observes, “was thus established in general outline before
the invention of the sewing machine or the harvesting machinery.
The new technique was a fundamental condition of the great achieve-
ments realized by inventors and manufacturers in those fields.”
Behind that improvement lay the fixed mass demand of the army.
A similar step in the direction of standardized production was made
in the British navy at almost the same time. Under Sir Samuel
Bentham and the elder Brunei the various tackleblocks and planks
of the wooden ships were cut to uniform measure: building became
the assemblage of accurately measured elements, rather than old-
fashioned cut-and-try handicraft production.

But there was still another place in which war forced the pace.
Not merely was gun-casting the “great stimulant of improved tech-

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 91

nique in the foimdry,” and not merely was “the claim of Henry Cort
to the gratitude of his fellow countrymen . . . based primarily on
the contribution he had made of military security,” as Ashton says,
but the demand for highgrade iron in large quantities went hand in
hand with the increase of artillery bombardment as a preparation
for assault, the effectiveness of which was presently demonstrated by
the brilliant young artilleryman who was to scourge Europe with
his technological genius whilst he liquidated the French revolution.
Indeed, the rigorous mathematical basis and the increasing precision
of artillery fire itself made it a model for the new industrial arts.
Napoleon III in the middle of the nineteenth century offered a reward
for a cheap process of making steel capable of withstanding the
explosive force of the new shells. The Bessemer process was the
direct answer to this demand.

The second department in which war anticipated the machine and
helped definitely to form it was in the social organization of the
army. Feudal warfare was usually on the basis of a forty-day serv-
ice: necessarily intermitted and therefore inefficient — ^apart from
further delays and stoppages occasioned by rain or cold or the Truce
of God. The change from feudal service to armies on a capitalist
basis, composed of workers paid by the day — ^the change, that is,
from the warrior to the soldier — did not entirely overcome this
inefficiency: for if the captains of the paid bands were quick to copy
the latest improvements in arms or tactics, the actual interest of the
paid soldier was to continue in the business of being a soldier: hence
warfare at times rose to the place it so often holds among savage
tribes — an exciting ritual played under carefully established rules,
with the danger reduced almost to the proportions of an old-fashioned
football game. There was always the possibility that the mercenary
band might go on a strike or desert to the other side: money, rather
than habit or interest or delusions of grandeur [patriotism] was
the chief means of discipline. Despite the new technical weapons, the
paid soldier remained inefficient.

The conversion of loose gangs of individuals with all their incal-
culable variations of strength and weakness, bravery and cowardice,
zeal and indifference, into the well-exercised, disciplined, unified

92 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

soldiery of the seventeenth century was a great mechanical feat.
Drill itself, after the long lapse from Roman practice in the West,
was re-introduced in the sixteenth century and perfected by Prince
Maurice of Orange and Nassau, and the psychology of the new indus-
trial order appeared upon the parade ground before it came, full-
fledged, into the workshop. The regimentation and mass-production
of soldiers, to the end of turning out a cheap, standardized, and
replaceable product, was the great contribution of the military mind
to the machine process. And along with this inner regimentation went
an outward one which had a further effect upon the productive
system; namely, the development of the military uniform itself.

Despite sumptuary laws regulating the costumes of different social
and economic groups, there was no real uniformity in the costume
of the Middle Ages: no matter how common the pattern there would
always, by the very nature of intermittent handicraft production,
be individual variations and deviations. Such uniforms as existed
were the special liveries of the great princes or municipalities:
Michelangelo designed such a uniform for the Papal Guards. But
with the growth in size of the army, and the daily exercise of drill,
it was necessary to create an outward token of the inner unison;
while small companies of men knew each other by face, larger ones
could be ensured from fighting each otlier only by a large visible
badge. The uniform was such a token and badge; first used on a
large scale in the seventeenth century. Each soldier must have the
same clothes, the same hat, tlie same equipment, as every other mem-
ber of his company: drill made them act as one, discipline made them
respond as one, the uniform made them look as one. The daily care
of the uniform was an important element in the new esprit de corps.

With an army of 100,000 soldiers, such as Louis XIV had, the
need for uniforms made no small demand upon industry: it was in
fact the first large-scale demand for absolutely standardized goods.
Individual taste, individual judgment, individual needs, other than
the dimensions of the body, played no part in this new department
of production; the conditions for complete mechanization were
present. The textile industries felt this solid demand, and when the
sewing machine was tardily invented by Thimonnet of Lyons in 1829,

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 93

one is not surprised to find that it was the French War Department
that sought first to use it. From the seventeenth century on the army
became the pattern not only of production but of ideal consumption
under the machine system.

Mark the effect of the large standing armies of the seventeenth
century, and the even larger conscript armies whose success in France
during the Revolution was to be so potent in the future development
of warfare. An army is a body of pure consumers. As the army
grew in size it threw a heavier and heavier burden upon productive
enterprise: for the army must be fed and housed and equipped, and
it does not, like the other trades, supply any service in return
except that of “protection” in times of war. In war, moreover, the
army is not merely a pure consumer but a negative producer: that
is to say, it produces illth, to use Ruskin’s excellent phrase, instead
of wealth — misery, mutilation, physical destruction, terror, starva-
tion and death characterize the process of war and form a principal
part of the product.

Now, the weakness of a capitalist system of production, based upon
the desire to increase the abstract tokens of power and wealth, is
the fact that the consumption and turnover of goods may be retarded
by human weaknesses: affectionate memory and honest workmanship.
These weaknesses sometimes increase the life of a product long after
the time an abstract economy would have it ticketed for replacement.
Such brakes on production are automatically excluded from the
army, particularly during the periods of active service: for the army
is the ideal consumer, in that it tends to reduce toward zero the gap
in time between profitable original production and profitable re-
placement. The most wanton and luxurious household cannot com-
pete with a battlefield in rapid consumption. A thousand men mowed
down by bullets are a demand more or less for a thousand more
uniforms, a thousand more guns, a thousand more bayonets: and a
thousand shells fired from cannon cannot be retrieved and used over
again. In addition to all the mischances of battle, there is a much
speedier destruction of stable equipment and supplies.

Mechanized warfare, which contributed so much to every aspect
of standardized mass-production, is in fact its great justification.

94 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Is it any wonder that it always acts as a temporary tonic on the
system it has done so much to produce? Quantity production must
rely for its success upon quantity consumption; and nothing ensures
replacement like organized destruction. In this sense, war is not only,
as it has been called, the health of the State: it is the health of
the machine, too. Without the non-production of war to balance ac-
counts algebraically, the heightened capacities of machine production
can be written off only in limited ways: an increase in foreign
markets, an increase in population, an increase in mass purchasing
power through the drastic restriction of profits. When the first two
dodges have been exhausted, war helps avert the last alternative, so
terrible to the kept classes, so threatening to the whole system that
supports them.

8: Drill and Deterioration

The deterioration of life under the regime of the soldier is a com-
monplace: hut just for tlrat reason it needs to be sharpened by
explicit statement.

Physical power is a rough substitute for patience and intelligence
and cooperative effort in the governance of men: if used as a normal
accompaniment of action instead of a last resort it is a sign of ex-
treme social weakness. Wlien a child is intolerably balked by another
person without precisely seeing the cause of the situation and without
sufficient force to carry through his own ends, he often solves the
matter by a simple wish: he wishes the other person were dead. The
soldier, a slave to the child’s ignorance and the child’s wish, differs
from him only by his ability to effect a direct passage to action.
Killing is the ultimate simplification of life: a whole stage beyond
the pragmatically justifiable restrictions and simplifications of the
machine. And while the effort of culture is toward completer differ-
entiation of perceptions and desires and values and ends, holding
them from moment to moment in a perpetually changing but stable
equilibrium, the animus of war is to enforce uniformity — ^to extirpate
whatever the soldier can neither understand nor utilize.

In his pathetic desire for simplicity, the soldier at bottom extends
the empire of irrationality, and by his effort to substitute force for

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 95

emotional and intellectual grasp, for natural loyalties and cohesions,
in short, for the organic processes of social life, he creates that alter-
nating rhythm of conquest and rebellion, repressions and reprisals,
which has punctuated such large periods of mankind’s existence.
Even when the warrior’s conquests are intelligently and almost benefi-
cently made — as in the later Inca Empire of Peru — the reactions
he sets in motion undermine the ends he has in view. For terrorism
and fear create a low psychic state. In the act of making himself
a master, the soldier helps create a race of slaves.

As for the sense of self-esteem the soldier achieves through his
willingness to face death, one cannot deny that it has a perverse
life-enhancing quality, hut it is common to the gunman and the
bandit, as well as to the hero: and there is no ground for the soldier’s
belief that the battlefield is the only breeder of it. The mine, the
ship, the blast furnace, the iron skeleton of bridge or skyscraper,
the hospital ward, the childbed bring out the same gallant response:
indeed, it is a far more common affair here than it is in the life
of a soldier, who may spend his best years in empty drill, having
faced no more serious threat of death than that from boredom.
An imperviousness to life-values other than those clustered around
the soldier’s underlying death-wish, is one of the most sinister
effects of the military discipline.

Fortunately for mankind, the army has usually been the refuge
of third-rate minds: a soldier of distinct intellectual capacity, a
Caesar or a Napoleon, stands out as a startling exception. If the
soldier’s mind went into action as intensely as his body, and if his
intellectual discipline were as unremitting as his drill, civilization
might easily have been annihilated long ago. Hence the paradox in
technics: war stimulates invention, but the army resists it! The rejec-
tion of Whitworth’s improved cannon and rifles in the midst of the
Victorian period is but a critical instance of a common process: Alfred
Krupp complained of similar resistance on the part of the army and
navy to technical advance. The delay in adopting the tank by the
German Army in the World War shows how torpid even “great”
warriors are. So in the end, the soldier has again and again become
the chief victim of his own simplification and short-cuts: in achieving

96 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

machine-like precision and regularity, he has lost the capacity for
intelligent response and adaptation. No wonder that in English to
soldier means to withhold efficiency in work.

The alliance of mechanization and militarization was, in sum,
an unfortunate one: for it tended to restrict the actions of social
groups to a military pattern, and it encouraged the rough-and-
ready tactics of the militarist in industry. It was unfortunate for so-
ciety at large that a power-organization like the army, rather than
the more humane and cooperative craft guild, presided over the
Birth of the modern forms of the machine.

9: Mars and Venus

If mechanical production w'as heightened and shaped by the active
demands of the battlefield and the parade-ground, it was also pos-
sibly influenced by tlie indirect effects of war during the specious
intervals of repose.

War is the chief instrument by means of which the ruling classes
create the state and fix their hold upon the state. These ruling classes,
whatever their military animus and origin, alternate their outbursts
of prowess with periods devoted to what Vehlen in his Theory of the
Leisure Class called the ritual of conspicuous waste.

From the sixth century onward in Western Europe military feudal-
ism had shared economic power with the peaceful monasteries, which
formed an important pillar in the social system: from the twelfth
century on the feudal lords had been curbed and kept in place by
the free cities. With the rise of the absolute monarchs of the six-
teenth century the old estates and corporations whose power had
been localized and distributed and therefore balanced by reason of
their relative autonomy, were absorbed, in effect, by the state: in the
great capitals of Europe power was concentrated symbolically — and
in part actually — in the absolute ruler. The culture of the great capi-
tals, crystallized and expressed with utmost potency in the Paris of
Louis XIV or the St. Petersburg of Peter the Great, became one-
sided, militarist, regimented, oppressive. In that milieu, the machine
could grow more lustily, for institutional life had been mechanized.
So the capital cities became the focus, not merely of spending, but

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 97

of capitalist production; and the lead they acquired then they have
retained right down to the present.

There is a psychological ground for the wastefulness and luxury
that manifested itself with such overpowering splendor in the six-
teenth century, and that carried the forms of the camp and the court
into every hole and corner of the modern community. At bottom,
this new opulence was connected with tlie brutal, disorderly, irre-
ligious mode of life which prevailed throughout society: it was not
a little like the raw outbursts of drunkenness and gambling that
alternated with the labor of tlie miner.

The military life, plainly, is a hard one. It involves, during its
active pursuit, a renunciation of the comforts and securities of a
normal domestic existence. The denial of the body, the deprivation
of the senses, the suppression of spontaneous impulses, the forced
marches, the broken sleep, the exhaustion of the marrow, the neglect
of cleanliness — all these conditions of active service leave no place
for the normal decencies of existence, and except for short intervals
for lust or rape the soldier’s sexual life is limited, too. The more
arduous the campaign — and it was just at this period that the
mechanization of arms and the serious discipline of drill took away
the last remnants of gentlemanly ease and amateur sportsmanship —
the greater the rigors and the tighter the checks, the more necessary
become the ultimate compensations.

When Mars comes home, Venus waits for him in bed: the theme
is a favorite one with all the Renascence painters, from Tintoretto
to Rubens. And Venus serves a double purpose: she not merely
gives him her body directly, but she matches the superbia of the
soldier with her own luxuria; and to the degree that she has been
neglected during the war she demands compensatory attention in
times of peace. Venus’s caresses are not by themselves enough to
offset the abstentions and beastly crudeness of the battlefield: after
the body has been neglected, it must be glorified. She must have
jewels, silks, perfumes, rare wines, anticipating and prolonging by
all possible means the erotic ritual itself. And she leaves nothing
undone to gain her end: she exposes her breasts, she takes off her
undergarments, reveals her limbs, even mons veneris itself to the

98 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

passer-by. From the housemaid to the princess, women consciously
or unconsciously adopt the habits of courtesans at the end of a
great period of strain and disorder and warfare: so, extravagantly,
life renews itself. The women’s styles that prevailed in the Western
World at the end of the last martial debauch match almost point
for point those that became fashionable at the end of the Directory —
down to the removal of the corset and the temporary abandonment
of the petticoat.

Just because the erotic impulses seek extra compensation for their
denial, they flow over and pervade every activity: the courtesan
consumes the substance of the warrior’s conquests. A plethora of
physical goods gives special point to the triumphs of the soldier
and justifies the pillage he brings home with him. Shakespeare
has given us an acute study of the relationship in Antony and Cleo-
patra; but tlie economic results of it are more important here than
tlie psychological consequences. Economically, the comiuest of Mars
by Venus means the heightened demand for luxuries of all sorts:
for satins, laces, velvets, brocades, for precious stones and gold
ornaments and finely wrought caskets to hold them: for downy
couches, perfumed baths, private apartments and private gardens
enclosing an Arbor of Love: in short, for the substance of an acquisi-
tive life. If the soldier does not supply it, the merchant must: if the
loot be not taken from the Court of Montezuma or a Spanish Galleon,
it must be earned in the counting house. Religion itself in these
courts and palaces had become an empty ceremony: is it any wonder
that luxury became almost a religion?

Now observe the contrast. Private luxury was not looked upon
with favor during the Middle Ages: indeed, a private life, in the
modern sense, scarcely existed. It was not merely that the sins
of pride, avarice and covetousness, with their possible by-products
of lechery and fornication, were, if not serious offenses, at least
hindrances to salvation: it was not merely that the standards of
living, judged by purely financial ideals, were modest. But the Mid-
dle Ages, with their constant tendency to symbolize, used gold and
jewels and artful workmanship as emblems of power. The Vir gin
could receive such tributes because she was Queen of Heaven: the

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 99

earthly king and queen, pope and prince, representatives of the
heavenly powers, might also have a certain measure of luxury to
indicate their station: finally, the guilds in their mysteries and
pageants might spend lavishly upon public shows. But luxury here
had a collective function: even among the privileged classes it did
not mean merely sensuous ease.

The breakdown of the medieval economy was marked by the
emergence of the ideal of private power and private possession. The
merchant, the capitalist, the freebooter, the captain of the condottieri,
quite as much as the original lords and princes of the land, attempted
to take over and monopolize for themselves the functions of civic
life. What had been a public function became a private gesture: the
morality play of the church became the masque of the court: the
mural paintings that belonged to a place and an institution, became
the removable easel picture that belonged to a private individual.
With the medieval restriction of usury flouted under the church in
the fifteenth century and abandoned even in theory by the protestant
reformers of the sixteenth century, the legal mechanism for acquis-
ition on a grand scale went hand in hand with the social and
psychological demand for an acquisitive life. War was not of course
the only motivating condition: but the place where the new luxury
was most visible and where it was carried to a pitch of refined
extravagance, was in the court.

Economically, the center of gravity shifted to the court: geograpi-
cally it shifted to the capital cities where the court — and the courtesan
— ^were both luxuriously housed. The great art of the Baroque period
is in the country houses and the town palaces: when churches and
monasteries were built, they were done in the same style: abstractly,
one could hardly tell the difference between the nave of one and
the ballroom of the other. One acquired riches in order to consume
goods according to the standards of the court: to “live like a prince”
became a byword. Over it all presided the courtesan. One acquired
power and riches in order to please her: one built her a palace: one
gave her many servants: one brought in a Titian to paint her. And
her own sense of power in turn throve on all the comforts and
beauties of her life, and she counted her body flattered in proportion

100 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

to her skill in extracting these luxuries. The summit of the Baroque
dream was reached when Louis XIV sentimentally built the mon-
strous palace of Versailles on the site of the old hunting lodge in
which he had first wooed Madame de la Valliere. But the dream
itself was a universal one: one encounters it in every memento of the
period, in the mind as well as in flesh and stone and canvas: perhaps
its most splendid embodiment was in Rabelais’s early conception
of the Abbey of Theleme. What went on at court became the criterion
of a good life; and tlie luxurious standards of consumption erected
there spread themselves gradually throughout every walk of society.

Not merely did life as a whole become the mean handiwork of
coachman, cook and groom: hut the court began likewise to take a
leading part in industrial production, too: the new luxury of china
for the table became a monopoly of the royal porcelain factories in
Prussia, Saxony, Denmark, Austria, and for woven goods the big
Gobelins factory became one of the main production centers in
France. In the effort to put on a front, the use of adulterations and
■substitutes became common. Marble was imitated in plaster, gold
in gilt, handwork in moulded ornament, glass was used instead of
precious stones. The reproduction for mass consumption of substi-
tutes, as in the jewelry of Birmingham, took the place of the slow
original creation of genuine handicraft: tlie systematic cheapening
through mass production and inferior materials for the sake of
achieving an effect beyond one’s means, occurred in ornament long
before it was applied to objects of use. With the spread of courtly
'ideals through society, the same change took place in the eighteenth
century as happened with the introduction of the “democratic” ideal
of military conscription. The standardized manufacture of cheap
jewelry and domestic ornaments and textiles went along directly with
the standardization of military equipment. And one notes ironically
that it was out of the capital Matthew Boulton had amassed in his
brummagem works at Soho that he was able to support James Watt
during the period when he was perfecting the steam engine.

The concentration upon insignificant luxuries as the mark of
economic well-being was in many ways an unfortunate prelude to
machine production; but it was not altogether sterile. As a result of

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 101

this consumptive ritual some of the great achievements in mechaniza-
tion were first conceived in terms of play: elaborate clocks whose
mannikins went through a procession of stiff and elegant movements:
dolls that moved by themselves: carriages like that Camus built for
young Louis XIV which went by clockwork: birds that twittered their
tails in time to the tinkling of a music box. Vain in origin, these toys,
these playful impulses, were not altogether fruitless. Certainly the
part played by toys and non-utilitarian instruments in fostering
important inventions cannot he lightly ignoi'ed. The first “use” of
the steam engine, as suggested by Hero, was to create magical effects
in the temple to awe the populace: and steam appears as an agent of
work in the tenth century, when used by Sylvester II to operate
an organ. The helicopter was invented as a toy in 1796. Not merely
did moving images first appear as a toy in the phenakistoscope, but
the magic lantern, which was utilized in tlie eventual production of
these images, was a seventeenth century toy attributed to Athanasius
Kircher. The gyroscope existed as a toy before it was used seriously
as a stabilization device; and the success of toy airplanes in the
seventies helped renew interest in the possibilities of flight. The
origin of the telephone and the phonograph is to be found in playful
automata; while the most powerful engines of the seventeenth cen-
tury, the water-wheels at Marly, were constructed to pump water into
the great fountains at Versailles. Even the desire for speed in travel
first appeared in a playful form before it was embodied in the rail-
road and tlic motor car: the promenade aerienne — our present scenic
railway — ^appeared before either of the utilitarian devices. <

The mechanical truth, in short, was sometimes first spoken in jest
— ^just as ether was first used in parlor games in America before it
was used in surgery. Indeed, the child’s naive interest in moving
wheels remains in only faint disguises as a large part of the adult
interest in machines: “engines are buckets and shovels dressed up
for adults.” The spirit of play enfranchised tlie mechanical imagina-
tion. Once the organization of the machine had started, however,
the idle amusements of the aristocracy did not for long remain idle.

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10: Consumptive Pull and Productive Drive

The development of the machine required both a trap and a bait,
a drive and a pull, a means and a destination. Without doubt, the
motive power came from technics and science: they were self-sustain-
ing interests, and with the smiths, the wheelwrights, the founders, the
clockmakers, and the growing body of experimenters and inventors,
the machine established itself as the center of tlie productive process.
But why should production itself have assumed such enormous pro-
portions? There is nothing within the machine milieu itself that can
explain this' fact: for in other cultures production, though it might
create vast surpluses for public works and public art, remained
a bare necessity of existence, often grudgingly met — not a center
of continuous and overwhelming interest. In the past, even in Western
Europe, men had worked to obtain the standard of living traditional
to their place and class: the notion of acquiring money in order to
move out of one’s class was in fact foreign to the earlier feudal and
corporate ideology. When their living became easy, people did not
go in for abstract acquisition: they worked less. And when Nature
abetted them, they often remained in the idyllic state of the Poly-
nesians or the Homeric Greeks, giving to art, ritual, and sex the best
of their energies.

The pull, as Sombart amply demonstrated in his little study of
Luxus und Kapitalismus, came mainly from the court and the
courtesan: they directed the energies of society toward an ever-
moving horizon of consumption. With the weakening of caste lines
and the development of bourgeois individualism the ritual of con-
spicuous expenditure spread rapidly throughout the rest of society:
it justified the abstractions of the money-makers and put to wider
uses the technical progress of the inventors. The ideal of a powerful
expensive life supplanted the ideal of a holy or a humane one.
Heaven, which had been deferred to the Hereafter in the scheme of
the Christian cosmos, was now to be enjoyed immediately: its streets
paved with precious stones, its glittering walls, its marbled halls,
were almost at hand — provided one had acquired money enough to
buy them.

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 103

Few doubted that the Palace was Heaven: few doubted its sacred-
ness. Even the poor, the overworked, the exploited were hypnotized
by this new ritual, and they permitted it to go on at their expense
with scarcely a murmur of protest until the French Revolution pro-
vided an interlude — after which the consumptive process was pur-
sued again with re-doubled voracity and justified by hypocritical
promises of plenty to the masses who paid the fiddler without calling
the tune. The abstention from earthly joys for the sake of the here-
after, a Hereafter such as was envisioned by St. John of Patmos, had
proved in fact to be one of those deceptive beatitudes, like the mo-
nastic regimen, which had worked out in. earthly life as the opposite
of the original aim. It was not a prelude to Heaven but a preparation
for capitalist enterprise. The necessity for abstention from imme-
diate pleasures, the postponement of present goods for future
rewards, indeed the very words used by nineteenth century writers
to justify the accumulation of capital and the taking of interest could
have been put in the mouth of any medieval preacher, endeavoring
to move men to put aside the immediate temptations of the flesh in
order to earn far greater rewards for their virtue in heaven. With
the acceleration of the machine, the gap in time between abstention
and reward could be lessened: at least for the middle classes, the
golden gates opened.

Puritanism and the counter-reformation did not seriously chal-
lenge these courtly ideals. The military spirit of the Puritans, under
Cromwell, for example, fitted in well with their sober, thrifty, indus-
trious life, concentrated upon money-making, as if by the avoidance
of idleness the machinations of the devil could be eluded without
avoiding devilish acts. Carlyle, the belated advocate of this militaris-
tic Puritanism, knew no other key to salvation than the gospel of
work: he held that even mammonism at its lowest was in connection
with the nature of things and so on the way to God. But acquisitive
ideals in production necessarily go hand in hand with acquisitive
modes of consumption. The puritan, who perhaps put his fortune
back into trade and industrial enterprise, in the long run only
made the ideals of the court spread more widely. Eventually in
society, if not in the life of the individual capitalist, the day of reck-

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
oning comes: saturnalia follows the puritan’s sober efforts. In a
society that knows no other ideals, spending becomes the chief source
of delight: finally, it amounts to a social duty.

Goods became respectable and desirable apart from the life-needs
they served: they could be accumulated: they could be piled in pal-
aces and storerooms: they could, when they resulted in surfeits and
duplications, be translated temporarily into the more ethereal forms
of money or bills of exchange or credit. To escape the lean restric-
tions of poverty became a sacred duty. Idleness was in itself a sin. A
life outside the purlieus of production, without special industrial
effort, without money-getting, had ceased to be respectable: the
aristocracy itself, moved by its own heightened demands for luxuries
and services, compromised with the merchant and manufacturing
classes, married into them, adopted their vocations and interests, and
welcomed new arrivals to the blessed state of riches. Philosophers
speculated, now with faltering attention and a distracted eye, upon
the nature of the good and the true and the beautiful. Was there any
doubt about it? Their nature was essentially whatever could be
embodied in material goods and profitably sold: whatever made life
easier, more comfortable, more secure, physically more pleasant: in
a word, better upholstered.

Finally, the theory of the new age, first formulated in terms of
pecuniary success, was expressed in social terms by the utilitarians
of the early nineteenth century. Happiness was the true end of man,
and it consisted in achieving the greatest good for the greatest
number. The essence of happiness was to avoid pain and seek pleas-
ure: the quantity of happiness, and ultimately the perfection of
human institutions, could be reckoned roughly by the amount of
goods a society was capable of producing: expanding wants: expand-
ing markets: expanding enterprises: an expanding body of con-
sumers. The machine made this possible and guaranteed its success.
To cry enough or to call a limit was treason. Happiness and expand-
ing production were one.

That life may be most intense and significant in its moments of
pain and anguish, that it may be most savorless in its moments of
repletion, that once the essential means of living are provided its

AGENTS OF MECHANIZATION 105

intensities and ecstasies and states of equilibrium cannot be meas-
ured mathematically in any relation whatever to the quantity of
goods consumed or the quantity of power exercised — in short, the
commonplaces of experience to the lover, the adventurer, the parent,
the artist, the philosopher, the scientist, the active worker of any
sort — ^these commonplaces were excluded from the popular working
creed of utilitarianism. If a Bentham or a Mill tried by casuistry to
meet them, a Gradgrind and a Bounderby merely ignored them.
Mechanical production had become a categorical imperative, more
strict than any Kant discovered in his bosom.

Here, plainly, even the courtesan, even the soldier, knew better
than the merchant and the utilitarian philosopher: at a pinch one
would risk his body or the comforts of the body for honor or for
love. In furthering the quantification of life, moreover, they had at
least seized concrete loot: fabrics and foods and wines and paintings
and gardens. But by the time the nineteenth century came, these
realities had turned for the most part into paper will-o’-the-wisps:
marshlights to beguile mankind from tangible goods and immediate
fruitions. What Sombart has called the fragmentary man had come
into existence: the coarse Victorian philistine whom Ruskin ironi-
cally contrasted with the cleancut “esthete” of a Greek coin. He
boasted, this fragmentary man, on the best utilitarian principles,
that he was not in business for his health. The fact was obvious. But
for what other reason should men be in business?

The belief in tlie good life as the goods life came to fruition
before the paleotechnic complex had taken shape. This conception
gave the machine its social goal and its justification, even as it
gave form to so many of its end-products. When the machine pro-
duced other machines or other mechanical utilities, its influence was
often fresh and creative: but when the desires it gratified remained
those that had been taken over uncritically from the upper classes
during the period of dynastic absolutism, power-politics, and Baroque
emptiness, its effect was to further tlie disintegration of human
values.

In short, the machine came into our civilization, not to save man
from the seiwitude to ignoble forms of work, but to make more

lOff TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

widely possible the servitude to ignoble standards of consumption
that had grown up among the military aristocracies. From the seven-
teenth century on, the machine was conditioned by the disordered
social life of Western Europe. Tlie machine gave an appearance of
order to that chaos: it promised fulfillment for that emptiness: but
all its promises were insidiously undermined by tire very forces that
gave it shape — tlie gambling of the miner, the power-lust of the
soldier, abstract pecuniary ends of the financier, and the luxurious
extensions of sexual power and surrogates for sex contrived by the
court and the courtesan. Ail these forces, all these purposes and
goals, are still visible in our machine-culture; by imitation they
have spread from class to class and from town to country. Good and
bad, clear and contradictory, amenable and refractory — ^liere is the
ore from which we must extract the metal of human value. Beside the
few ingots of precious metal we have refined, the mountains of slag
are enormous. But it is not all slag: far from it. One can even now
look forward to the day when the poison gases and caked refuse,
the once useless by-products of the machine, may be converted by
intelligence and social cooperation to more vital uses.

CHAPTER III.

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE

1 : Technical Syncretism

Civilizations are not self-contained organisms. Modem man could
not have found his own particular modes of thought or invented his
present technical equipment without drawing freely on the cultures
that had preceded him or that continued to develop about him.

Each great differentiation in culture seems to be the outcome, in
fact, of a process of syncretism. Flinders Petrie, in his discussion of
Egyptian civilization, has shown that the admixture which was neces-
sary for its development and fulfillment even had a racial basis; and
in the development of Christianity it is plain that the most diverse
foreign elements — a Dionysian earth myth, Greek philosophy, Jew-
ish Messianism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism — all played a part in
giving the specific content and even the form to the ultimate collec-
tion of myths and offices that became Christianity.

Before this syncretism can take place, the cultures from which
the elements are drawn must either be in a state of dissolution, or
sufficiently remote in time or space so that single elements can be
extracted from the tangled mass of real institutions. Unless this con-
dition existed the elements themselves would not be free, as it were,
to move over toward the new pole. Warfare acts as such an agent of
dissociation, and in point of time the mechanical renascence of
Western Europe was associated with the shock and stir of the Cru-
sades. For what the new civilization picks up is not the complete
forms and institutions of a solid culture, but just those fragments
that can be transported and transplanted: it uses inventions, patterns,

ideas, in the way that the Gothic builders in England used the occa-

107

108 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

sional stones or tiles of the Roman villa in combination with the
native flint and in the entirely different forms of a later architecture.
If the villa had still been standing and occupied, it could not have
been conveniently quarried. It is the death of the original form, or
rather, the remaining life in the ruins, that permits the free working
over and integration of the elements of other cultures.

One further fact about syncretism must be noted. In tlie first stages
of integration, before a culture has set its o-vvn definite mark upon
the materials, before invention has crystallized into satisfactory
habits and routine, it is free to draw upon the widest sources. The
beginning and tlie end, the first absorption and the final spread and
conquest, after the cultural integration has taken place, are over a
worldwide realm.

These generalizations apply to the origin of the present-day ma-
chine civilization; a creative syncretism of inventions, gathered from
the technical debris of other civilizations, made possible the new
mechanical body. The waterwheel, in the form of the Noria, had
been used by the Egyptians to raise water, and perhaps by the
Sumerians for other purposes; certainly in the early part of the
Christian era watermills had become fairly common in Rome. Tlie
windmill perhaps came from Persia in the eighth century. Paper,
the magnetic needle, gunpowder, came from China, the first two
by way of the Arabs: algebra came from India through the Arabs,
and chemistry and physiology came via the Arabs, too, while geom-
etry and mechanics had their origins in pre-Christian Greece. The
steam engine owed its conception to the great inventor and scientist.
Hero of Alexandria: it was the translations of his works in the six-
teenth century that turned attention to the possibilities of this instru-
ment of power.

In short, most of the important inventions and discoveries that
served as the nucleus for further mechanical development, did not
arise, as Spengler would have it, out of some mystical inner drive
of the Faustian soul: they were wind-blown seeds from other cul-
tures. After the tenth century in Western Europe the ground was, as
I have shown, well plowed and harrowed and dragged, ready to
receive these seeds; and while the plants themselves were growing.

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 109

the cultivators of art and science were busy keeping the soil friable.
Taking root in medieval culture, in a different climate and soil, these
seeds of the machine sported and took on new forms: perhaps, pre-
cisely because they had not originated in Western Europe and had no
natural enemies there, they grew as rapidly and gigantically as the
Canada thistle when it made its way onto the South American pampas.
But at no point — and this is the important thing to remember — did
the machine represent a complete break. So far from being unpre-
pared for in liuman history, the modern machine age cannot he
understood except in terms of a very long and diverse preparation.
The notion tliat a handful of British inventors suddenly made the
wheels hum in the eighteenth century is too crude even to dish up
as a fairy tale to children.

2 : The Technological Complex

Looking back over the last thousand years, one can divide the
development of the machine and the machine civilization into three
successive but over-lapping and interpenetrating phases: eotechnic,
paleotechnic, neotechnic. The demonstration that industrial civiliza-
tion was not a single whole, but showed two marked, contrasting
phases, was first made by Professor Patrick Geddes and published
a generation ago. In defining the paleotechnic and neotechnic phases,
he however neglected the important period of preparation, when
all the key inventions were either invented or foreshadowed. So,
following the arclumlogical parallel he called attention to, I shall
call the first period the eotechnic phase: the dawn age of modern
technics.

Wfiiile each of tliese phases roughly represents a period of human
history, it is characterized even more significantly by the fact that
it forms a technological complex. Each phase, that is, has its origin
in certain definite regions and tends to employ certain special re-
sources and raw materials. Each phase has its specific means of
utilizing and generating energy, and its special forms of production.
Finally, each phase brings into existence particular types of workers,
trains them in particular ways, develops certain aptitudes and dis-

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

courages others, and draws upon and further develops certain aspects
of the social heritage.

Almost any part of a technical complex will point to and symbolize
a whole series of relationships witliin that complex. Take the various
types of writing pen. The goose-quill pen, sharpened by the user, is
a typical eotechnic product: it indicates the handicraft basis of in-
dustry and the close connection with agriculture. Economically it is
cheap; technically it is crude, but easily adapted to the style of the
user. The steel pen stands equally for the paleotechnic phase: cheap
and uniform, if not durable, it is a typical product of the mine, the
steel mill and of mass-production. Technically, it is an improvement
upon the quill-pen; but to approximate the same adaptability it must
be made in half a dozen different standard points and shapes. And
finally the fountain pen — though invented as early as the seventeenth
century — is a typical neotechnic product. With its barrel of rubber
or synthetic resin, with its gold pen, with its automatic action, it
points to the finer neotechnic economy: and in its use of the durable
iridium tip the fountain pen characteristically lengthens the service
of the point and reduces the need for replacement. These respective
characteristics are reflected at a hundred points in the typical en-
vironment of each phase; for though the various parts of a complex
may be invented at various times, the complex itself will not be in
working order until its major parts are all assembled. Even today
the neotechnic complex still awaits a number of inventions necessary
to its perfection: in particular an accumulator with six times the
voltage and at least the present amperage of the existing types of
cell.

Speaking in terms of power and characteristic materials, the
eotechnic phase is a water-and-wood complex: the paleotechnic phase
is a coal-and-iron complex, and the neotechnic phase is an electricity-
and-alloy complex. It was Marx’s great contribution as a sociological
economist to see and partly to demonstrate that each period of inven-
tion and production had its own specific value for civilization, or,
as he would have put it, its own historic mission. The machine cannot
be divorced from its larger social pattern; for it is this pattern that
gives it meaning and purpose. Every period of civilization carries

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 111

within it the insignificant refuse of past technologies and the im-
portant germs of new ones: but the center of growth lies within its
own complex.

The dawn-age of our modern technics stretches roughly from the
year 1000 to 1750. During this period the dispersed technical ad-
vances and suggestions of other civilizations were brought together,
and the process of invention and experimental adaptation went on
at a slowly accelerating pace. Most of the key inventions necessary
to universalize the machine were promoted during this period; there
is scarcely an element in the second phase that did not exist as a
germ, often as an embryo, frequently as an independent being, in
the first phase. This complex reached its climax, technologically
speaking, in the seventeenth century, with the foundation of experi-
mental science, laid on a basis of mathematics, fine manipulation,
accurate timing, and exact measurement.

The eotechnic phase did not of course come suddenly to an end
in the middle of the eighteentli century: just as it reached its climax
first of all in Italy in the sixteenth century, in the work of Leonardo
and his talented contemporaries, so it came to a delayed fruition in
the America of 1850. Two of its finest products, the clipper ship and
the Thonet process of making bent-wood furniture, date from the
eighteeen-thirties. There were parts of the world, like Holland and
Denmark, which in many districts slipped directly from an eotechnic
into the neotechnic economy, without feeling more than the cold
shadow of the paleotechnic cloud.

With respect to human culture as a whole, the eotechnic period,
though politically a chequered one, and in its later moments charac-
terized by a deepening degradation of the industrial worker, was
one of the most brilliant periods in history. For alongside its great
mechanical achievements it built cities, cultivated landscapes, con-
structed buildings, and painted pictures, which fulfilled, in the
realm of human thought and enjoyment, the advances that were being
decisively made in the practical life. And if this period failed to
establish a just and equitable polity in society at large, there were
at least moments in the life of the monastery and the commune that

H2 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

were close to its dream: the afterglow of this life was recorded in
More’s Utopia and Andreae’s Christianopolis.

Noting the underlying unity of eotechnic civilization, through all
its superficial changes in costume and creed, one must look upon its
successive portions as expressions of a single cultui-e. This point is
now being re-enforced by scholars who have come to disbelieve in
the notion of the gigantic break supposed to have been made during
the Renascence: a contemporary illusion, unduly emphasized by
later historians. But one must add a qualification: namely, that with
the increasing technical advances of this society there was, for rea-
sons partly independent of tlie machine itself, a corresponding
cultural dissolution and decay. In short, the Renascence was not,
socially speaking, the dawn of a new day, but its twilight. The
mechanical arts advanced as tlie humane arts weakened and re-
ceded, and it was at the moment when form and civilization had
most completely broken up that the tempo of invention became more
rapid, and the multiplication of machines and the increase of power
took place.

3: New Sources of Power

At the bottom of the eotechnic economy stands one important
fact: the diminished use of human beings as prime movers, and the
separation of tlie production of energy from its application and
immediate control. While the tool still dominated production energy
and human skill were united within the craftsman himself: with the
separation of these t\^o elements the productive process itself tended
toward a greater impersonality, and the machine-tool and the ma-
chine developed along with the new engines of power. If power
machinery be a criterion, the modern industrial revolution began
in the twelfth century and was in full swing by the fifteenth.

.r The eotechnic period was marked first of all by a steady increase
in actual horsepower. This came directly from two pieces of ap-
paratus: first, the introduction of the iron horseshoe, probably in
the ninth century, a device that increased the range of the horse, by
adapting him to other regions besides the grasslands, and added
to his effective pulling power by giving his hoofs a grip. Second: by

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 113

the tenth century the modern form of harness, in which the pull is
met at the shoulder instead of at the neck, was re-invented in West-
ern Europe — it had existed in China as early as 200 B.c. — and by
the twelfth century, it had supplanted the inefficient harness the
Romans had known. The gain was a considerable one, for the horse
was now not merely a useful aid in agriculture or a means of trans-
port: he became likewise an improved agent of mechanical pro-
duction: mills utilizing horsepower directly for grinding com or
for pumping water came into existence all over Europe, sometimes
supplementing other forms of non-human power, sometimes serving
as the principal source. The increase in the number of horses was
made possible, again, by improvements in agriculture and by the
opening up of the hitherto sparsely cultivated or primeval forest
areas in northern Europe. This created a condition somewhat simi-
lar to that which was repeated in America during the pioneering
period : the new colonists, with plenty of land at their disposal, were
lacking above all in labor power, and were compelled to resort to
ingenious labor-saving devices that the better settled regions in the
south with their surplus of labor and their easier conditions of living
were never forced to invent. This fact perhaps was partly responsible
for the high degi'ee of technical initiative that marks the period.

But while horse power ensured the utilization of mechanical
methods in regions not otherwise favored by nature, the greatest
technical progress came about in regions that had abundant supplies
of wind and water. It was along the fast flowing streams, the Rhone
and the Danube and the small rapid rivers of Italy, and in the North
Sea and Baltic areas, with their strong winds, that this new civiliza-
tion had its firmest foundations and some of its most splendid cultural
expressions.

Water-wheels for raising water in a chain of pots and for working
automatic figures were described by Philo of Byzantium in the
third century B.C.; and water-mills were definitely recorded in
Rome in the first century B.c. Antipater of Thessalonica, a con-
temporary of Cicero, sang his praise of the new mills in the fol-
lowing poem: “Cease from grinding, ye women who toil at the
mill; sleep late even if the crowing cocks announce the dawn. For

114 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Demeter has ordered the Nymphs to perform the work of your hands,
and they, leaping down on the top of the wheel, turn its axle which,
with its revolving spokes, turns the heavy concave Nisyrian mill-
stones. We taste again the joys of the primitive life, learning to feast
on the products of Demeter without labor.” The allusion is signifi-
cant; it shows, as Marx pointed out, how much more humanely
classic civilizations regarded labor-saving devices than did the enter-
prisers of the nineteenth century; and it proves, furthermore, that
though the more primitive horizontal wheel was probably earlier,
and because of its simple construction was used widely, the more
complicated vertical type had come into use — ^and apparently like-
wise with the more efficient overshot wheel. Vitruvius, in his treatise
on architecture, describes the design of gearing to regulate the speed.

Unlike the elaborate sanitary facilities of Rome, the water-mill
never fell into complete disuse. There are allusions to such mills, as
Usher points out, in a collection of Irish laws- in the fifth century;
and they crop out at intervals in other laws and chronicles. Tliough
first used to grind corn, the water-mill was used to saw wood as
early as the fourth century; and while, with the breakdown of the
Empire and the decrease of the population, the number of mills may
have decreased for a time, tliey came back again in the land-redemp-
tion and the land-colonization that took place under the monastic
orders around the tenth century: by the time the Domesday Book
survey was made there were five thousand water-mills in England
alone — ^about one to every four hundred people — and England was
then a backward country on the fringe of European civilization. By
the fourteenth century, the water-mill had become common for manu-
facturing in all the great industrial centers: Bologna, Augsburg, Ulm.
Their use possibly w'orked down the rivers toward the estuaries; for
in the sixteenth century the low countries used water-mills to take
advantage of the power of the tides.

Grinding grain and pumping water were not the only operations
for which the water-mill was used: it furnished power for pulping
rags for paper (Ravensburg: 1290) : it ran the hammering and cut-
ting machines of an ironworks (near Dobrilugk, Lausitz, 1320) : it
sawed wood (Augsburg: 1322) : it beat hides in the tannery, it fur-

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 115

nished power for spinning silk, it was used in fulling-mills to work
up the felts, and it turned the grinding machines of the armorers.
The wire-pulling machine invented by Rudolph of Niirnberg in 1400
was worked by water-power. In the mining and metal working opera-
tions Dr. Georg Bauer described the great convenience of water-
power for pumping purposes in the mine, and suggested that if it
could be utilized conveniently, it should be used instead of horses
or man-power to turn the underground machinery. As early as the
fifteenth century, water-mills were used for crushing ore. The im-
portance of water-power in relation to the iron industries cannot
be over-estimated; for by utilizing this power it was possible to
make more powerful bellows, attain higher heats, use larger fur-
naces, and therefore increase the production of iron.

The extent of all these operations, compared with those under-
taken today in Essen or Gary, was naturally small: hut so was the
society. The diffusion of power was an aid to the diffusion of popu-
lation: as long as industrial power was represented directly by the
utilization of energy, rather than by financial investment, the balance
between the various regions of Europe and between town and country
within a region was pretty evenly maintained. It was only with the
swift concentration of financial and political power in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, that the excessive growth of Antwerp,
London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Lyons, Naples, took place.

Only second to waterpower in importance was windpower. "What-
ever the route it entered, the windmill spread rapidly in Europe, and
it was widely diffused by the end of the twelfth century. The first
definite knowledge of the windmill comes from a charter in 1105
authorizing the Abbot of Savigny to establish windmills in the diocese
of Evreux, Bayeux, and Coutances; in England, the first date is 1143,
and in Venice 1332: in 1341 the Bishop of Utrecht sought to estab-
lish authority over the winds that blew in his province: that in itself
is almost enough to establish the industrial value of the windmill
in the Low Countries by this time.

Apart from the wind-turbine, described as early as 1438, there
were three types. In the most primitive type the entire structure faced
the prevailing wind: in another, the entire structure tufned to face it,

116 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

sometimes being mounted on a boat to facilitate this; and in the most
developed type the turret alone turned. The mill reached its greatest
size and its most efficient form in the hands of the Dutch engineers
toward the end of the sixteenth century, although the Italian engi-
neers, including Leonardo himself, who is usually given credit for
the turret windmill, contributed their share to the machine. In this
development the Low Countries were almost as much the center of
power production as England was during the later coal and iron
regime. The Dutch provinces in particular, a mere film of sand,
drenched with wind and water, plowed from one end to the other
by the Rhine, the Amstel, the Maas, developed the windmill to tlie
fullest possible degree: it ground the grain produced on the rich
meadow's, it sawed the wood brought down from the Baltic coast to
make the great merchant marine, and it ground the spices — some five
hundred thousand pounds per annum by the seventeenth cenluiy —
that %vere brought from the Orient. A similar civilization spread up
and doAvn the peaty marshlands and barrier beaches from Flanders
to the Elbe, for the Saxon and East Frisian shores of the Baltic had
been repeopled by Dutch colonists in the twelfth century.

Above all, the windmill was the chief agent in land reclamation.
The threat of inundation by the sea led these North Sea fishermen
and farmers to attempt not only to conti-ol the water itself, but by
keeping it back, to add to the land. The game was woith the effort,
for this heavy soil provided rich pasture, after it was drained and
sweetened. First carried on by the monastic orders, this reclamation
had become, by the sixteenth century, one of the major industries
of the Dutch. Once the dykes were built, however, tire problem was
how keep the area under the level of the sea clear of water: the
windmill, which operates most steadily and strongly precisely when
the storms are most fierce, was the means of raising the water of
the rising streams and canals: it maintained tlie balance between tlie
water and the land that made life possible in this precarious situa-
tion. Under the stimulus of self-imposed necessity, the Dutch became
the leading engineers of Europe: their only rivals were in Italy.
When the English, in the early seventeenth century, wished to drain

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117

their fens, they invited Cornelius Vermeyden, a celebrated Dutch
engineer, to undertake the job.

The gain in energy through using wind and water power was not
merely direct. By making possible the cultivation of the rich soil of
the polder, these mechanical instruments reversed that steady degra-
dation of the soil which had resulted from the cutting down of the for-
est cover and from the improvident system of agriculture that had
succeeded the best Roman practice. Land building and irrigation are
the signs of a planned, regenerative agriculture: the windmill added
absolutely to the amount of energy avilable by helping to throw open
these rich lands, as well as by protecting them and helping to work
up their ultimate products.

This development of wind and water power did not reach its height
in most parts of Europe until the seventeenth century: in England,
not till the eighteenth century. How great was the increase of non-
organic energy during this period? What was the sum total of non-
human energy applied to production? It is difficult, perhaps impos-
sible, to make even a rough guess as to the total amount of energy
available: all one can say is that it kept increasing steadily from the
eleventh century on. Marx observed that in Holland as late as 1836
there were 12,000 windmills in existence, giving as much as six
thousand horse-power: but the estimate is too low, for one authority
rates the average efficiency of the Dutch windmills as high as ten
horse-power each; while Vowles notes that the ordinary old-fashioned
type of Dutch windmill with four sails each twenty-four feet long
and six feet wide generates about 4.5 brake horse-power in a twenty
mile wind. Of course this estimate does not include the water power
that was being used. Potentially, the amount of energy available for
production was high as compared with any previous civilization. In
the seventeenth century the most powerful prime mover in existence
was the waterworks for Versailles: it developed a hundred horse-
power and could raise a million gallons a day 502 feet. But as early
as 1582 Peter Morice’s tide-mill pumps, erected in London, raised
four million gallons of water a day through a 12 inch pipe into a
tank 128 feet high.

While the supply of both wind and water was subject to the

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
vagaries of local weather and the annual rainfall, there was prob-
ably compared to the present day less stoppage through variations
in the human labor requirement, owing to strikes, lockouts, and over-
production. In addition to this, since neither wind nor water-power
could be effectually monopolized — despite many efforts from the
thirteenth century on to prohibit small mills and querns, and to es-
tablish tlie custom of grinding at the lord’s mill — the source of
energy itself was free : once built, the mill added nothing to the cost
of production. Unlike the later primitive steam engine, both a large
and a costly device, very small and primitive water mills could be
built, and were built; and since most of the moveable parts were of
wood and stone, the original cost was low and the deterioration
through seasonal disuse was not as great as would have been the
case had iron been used. The mill was good for a long life; the
upkeep was nominal; the supply of power was inexhaustible. And
so far from robbing the land and leaving behind debris and depopu-
lated villages, as mining did, the mills helped enrich the land and
facilitated a conservative .stable agriculture.

Thanks to the menial services of wind and water, a large
intelligentsia could come into existence, and great works of art and
scholarship and science and engineering could be created without
recourse to slavery: a release of energy, a victory for the human
spirit. Measuring the gains not in horsepower originally used but
in work finally accomplished, the eotechnic period compares favor-
ably both with the epochs that preceded it and with the phases of
mechanical civilization that followed it. Wlien the textile industries
attained an unheard of volume of production in the eighteenth cen-
tury it was by means of water-power, not the steam engine, that this
was first achieved; and the first prime mover to exceed the poor five
or ten per cent efficiency of the early steam engines was Foumeyron’s
water-turbine, a further development of the Baroque spoonwheel,
perfected in 1832. By the middle of the nineteenth century water-
turbines of 500 H.P. had been built. Plainly, the modern industrial
revolution would have come into existence and gone on steadily had
not a ton of coal been dug in England, and had not a new iron mine
been opened.

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119

4: Trunk, Plank, and Spar

The mystic identification with the life of the old forests, which one
feels in the ballads and folk-tales of the period, expressed a fact
about the civilization which was emerging: wood was the universal
material of the eotechnic economy.

First of all, wood was the foundation of its building. All the
elaborate masonry forms were dependent upon the work of the car-
penter: it was not merely that the piers themselves, in the later gothic
construction, resembled tree trunks laced together or that the filtered
light within the church had the dimness of the forest, while the effect
of the bright glass was like that of the blue sky or a sunset seen
through the tracery of branches: the fact is that none of this con-
struction was possible without an elaborate falsework of wood: nor
without wooden cranes and windlasses could the stones have been
conveniently raised the necessary heights. Moreover, wood alter-
nated with stone as a building material; and when in the sixteenth
century the windows of the dwelling began to imitate in breadth
and openness those of the public buildings, wooden beams carried
the load across a space impossible for ordinary stone or brick con-
struction to span: in Hamburg the burgher houses of the sixteenth
century have windows across the whole front.

As for the common tools and utensils of the time, they were more
often of wood than of any other material. The carpenter’s tools were
of wood, but for the last cutting edge: the rake, the oxyoke, the cart,
the wagon, were of wood: so was the washtub in the bathhouse: so
was the bucket and so was the broom: so in certain parts of Europe
was the poor man’s shoe. Wood served the farmer and the textile
worker: the loom and the spinning-wheel, the oil presses and the
wine presses were of wood, and even a hundred years after the
printing press was invented, it was still made of wood. The very
pipes that carried water in the cities were often tree-trunks: so were
the cylinders of pumps. One rocked a wooden cradle; one slept on a
wooden bed; and when one dined one “boarded.” One brewed beer in
a wooden vat and put the liquor in a wooden barrel. Stoppers of
cork, introduced after the invention of the glass bottle, begin to be

120 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

mentioned in the fifteenth century. The ships of course were made
of wood and pegged together with wood: but to say that is only to
say that the principal machines of industry were likewise made of
wood: the lathe, the most important machine-tool of the period, was
made entirely of wood — not merely the base but the moveable parts.
Every part of the windmill and the water-mill except for the grind-
ing and cutting elements was made of wood, even the gearing: the
pumps were chiefly of wood, and even the steam engine, down to
the nineteenth century, had a large number of wooden parts: the
boiler itself might be of barrel construction, the metal being con-
fined to the part exposed to the fire.

In all the operations of industry, wood played a part out of all
proportion to that played by metals: had it not, indeed, been for the
demand for metal coins, armor, cannons, and cannon-balls during
this period, the need for metals would have been relatively insig-
nificant: it was not merely the direct use of wood, but its part in
mining and smelting and forging, that was responsible, as I pointed
out before, for the destruction of the forests. The operations of min-
ing demanded wooden beams to serve as shoring: wooden carts trans-
ported the ore, and wooden planks carried the load over the uneven
surface of the mine.

Most of the key machines and inventions of the later industrial
age were first developed in wood before they were translated into
metal: wood provided the finger-exercises of the new industrialism.
The debt of iron to wood was a heavy one: as late as 1820 Ithiel
Town, a New Haven architect, patented a new type of lattice truss
bridge, free from arch action and horizontal thrust, which became the
prototype of many later iron bridges. As raw material, as tool, as ma-
chine-tool, as machine, as utensil and utility, as fuel, and as final
product wood was the dominant industrial resource of the eotechnic
phase.

Wind, water, and wood combined tp form the basis for still an-
other important technical development: the manufacture and opera-
tion of boats and ships.

If the twelfth century witnessed the introduction of the mariner’s
compass, the thirteenth brought the installation of the permanent

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121

rudder, used instead of the oar for steering, and the sixteenth intro-
duced the use of the clock to determine longitude and the use of the
quadrant to determine latitude — ^while the paddle-wheel, which was
not to become important until the nineteenth century, was invented
possibly as early as the sixth century, and was designed definitely in
1410, if not put into use until later. Out of the needs of navigation
came that enormous labor-saving device, the logarithmic table,
worked out by Briggs on Napier’s foundation, and a little more than
a century later the ship’s chronometer was finally perfected by
Harrison.

At the beginning of this period sails, which had hitherto been used
chiefly with oars, began to supplant them and wind took the place
of hu m an muscle for working ships. In the fifteenth century the two-
masted ship had come into existence: but it was dependent upon a
fair wind. By 1500 the three-masted ship had appeared, and it was
so far improved that it could heat against the wind: long ocean voy-
ages were at last possible, without a Viking’s daring and a Job’s
patience. As shipping increased and the art of navigation improved,
harbors were developed, lighthouses were placed on treacherous
parts of the coast, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century the
first lightships were put to anchor on the Nore Sands off the English
coast. With growing confidence in his ability to steer, to make head-
way, to find his position, and to reach port, the sailor replaced the
slow land routes with his water routes. The economic gain due to
water transport has been calculated for us by Adam Smith: “A
broad-wheeled wagon,” he observes in The Wealth of Nations, “at-
tended by two men and drawn by eight horses, in about six weeks’
time carries and brings back between London and Edinburgh near
four ton weight of goods. In about the same time a ship navigated
by six or eight men, and sailing between the ports of London and
Leith, frequently carries and brings back two himdred ton weight of
goods. Six or eight men, therefore, by the help of water carriage,
can carry and bring back in the same time the same quantity of
goods between London and Edinburgh, as 50 broad-wheeled waggons,
attended by a hundred men, and drawn by 400 horses.”

But ships served not only for facilitating international transport

122 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

and trade over the ocean and along the continental rivers: boats also
served for regional and local transportation. The two dominant cities,
one at the beginning and the other at the end of the eotechnic period
were Venice and Amsterdam: both of them built upon piles, both of
them served by a network of canals. The canal itself was an ancient
utility; but the widespread use of it in Western Europe definitely
characterized this new economy. From the sixteenth century on canals
supplemented the natural waterways: useful for the purposes of
irrigation and drainage, and in both departments a boon to agricul-
ture, canals also became the new highways in the more progressive
regions of Europe. It was on the canals of Holland that the first regu-
lar and reliable transportation service came into existence: almost
two centuries before the railroad. “Except in the case of ice,” as
Dr. H. W. Van Loon observes, “the canal boat ran as regularly as a
train. It did not depend upon ihe wind and the condition of the
roads.” And the service was frequent: tliere were sixteen boats be-
tween Delft and Rotterdam every day.

The first big navigation canal was that between the Baltic and the
Elbe; but by the seventeenth century tiolland had a network of local
and trans-regional canals that served to coordinate industry, agricul-
ture, and transport. Incidentally, the contained and quiet waters of
the canal, with its graded bank and its tow-path, was a great labor-
saving device: the effectiveness of a man and a single horse, or a
man with a pole, is incomparably higher on a water highway than
on a land highway.

The order of development here is significant. Apart from begin-
nings in Italy — including Leonardo’s plan for improving the naviga-
tion of rivers by canalization and locks — ^the first great system of
canals was in the Low Countries, where they had been instituted by
the Romans: then in France in the seventeenth century, with the
Briare, Centre, and Languedoc canals, then in England in the
ei^teenth century, and finally in America — except for the minor
city canals of New Amsterdam — in the nineteenth century. The pro-
gressive countries of the paleotechnic era were in this respect the
backward ones of the eotechnic phase. And just as the windmills and
water-mills served to distribute power, so the canal distributed popu-

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 123

lation and goods and effected a closer union between town and coun-
try. Even in America one could see the typical eotechnic pattern of
population and industry in the State of New York around 1850 ,
when, on the basis of local saw mills, local gristmills, and an inter-
lacing system of canals and dirt roads, the entire state was populated
with remarkable evenness, and industrial opportunities were avail-
able at almost every point in the entire region. This balance between
agriculture and industry, this diffusion of civilization, was one of
the great social achievements of the eotechnic period: to this day, it
gives to the Dutch village an outward touch of fine urbanity; and it
offers a marked contrast with the atrocious lopsidedness of the period
that followed.

The development of ships, harbors, lighthouses, and canals went
on steadily: indeed, the eotechnic complex held together longer in
maritime matters than it did in any other department of activity. The
fastest type of sailing ship, the clipper, was not designed until the
eighteen forties, and it was not until the twentieth century that the
triangular type of mainsail replaced the topheavy polygon on the
smaller craft and improved their speed. The sailing ship, like the
windmill and the water-mill, was at the mercy of wind and water:
but the gains in labor-saving and in horse-power, though again in-
calculable, were tremendously important. To speak of power as a
recent acquisition of industry is to forget the kinetic energy of fall-
ing water and moving air; while to forget the part of the sailing
ship in power-utilization is to betray a landlubber’s ignorance of the
realities of economic life from the twelfth century down to the third
quarter of the nineteenth. Apart from this, the ship was indirectly a
factor in rationalizing production and standardizing goods. Thus
large factories for manufacturing ship’s biscuits were built in Hol-
land in the seventeenth century; and the manufacture of ready-to-
wear clothing for civilians was first begun in New Bedford in the
eighteen-forties because of the need for quickly outfitting sailors
when they reached port.

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5: Through a Glass, Brightly

But most important of all was the part played by glass in the
eotechnic economy. Through glass new worlds were conceived and
brought within reach and unveiled. Far more significant for civiliza-
tion and culture than progress in the metallurgical arts up to the
eighteenth century was the great advance in glass-making.

Glass itself was a very ancient discovery of the Egyptians, or pos-
sibly even of some more primitive people. Beads of glass have been
found as far back as 1800 B.c. and openings for glass windows were
found in the excavation of Pompeian houses. In the early Middle
Ages, glass furnaces began to come back, first in the wooded dis-
tricts near the monasteries, tlien near the cities: glass was used for
holding liquids and for making tlie windows of public buildings.
The early glass was of indifferent texture and finish: but by the
twelfth century glass of intense color was made, and the use of tliese
glasses in the windows of tlie new churches, admitting light, modi-
fying it, transforming it, gave them a sombre brilliance that the most
ornate carving and gold of the baroque churches only feebly rival.

By the thirteenth century the famous glass works at Murano, near
Venice, had been founded; and glass was already used there for
windows, for ship-lantenis, and for goblets. Despite the most zealous
efforts to keep secret the technical methods of the Venetian glass
workers, the knowledge of die art spread to other parts of Europe:
by 1373 there was a guild of glassmakers in Niirnberg, and the
development of glass-making went on steadily in other parts of
Europe. In France it was one of the few trades that could be car-
ried on by a noble family — ^thus taking on the characteristics of
porcelain manufacture — and as early as 1635 Sir Robert Mansell
obtained a monopoly for making flint glass in consideration of his
being the first person who employed pit-coal instead of wood in his
furnaces in England.

The development of glass changed the aspect of indoor life, par-
ticularly in regions with long winters and cloudy days. At jfirst it
was such a precious commodity that the glass panes were removable
and were put in a safe place when the occupants left the house for

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125

any time. This high cost restricted glass to public buildings, but step
by step it made its way into the private dwelling: Aeneas Sylvius
da Piccolomini found in 1448 that half the houses in Wien had
glass windows, and toward the end of the sixteenth century glass
assumed in the design and construction of the dwelling house a place
it had never had in any previous architecture. A parallel develop-
ment went on in agriculture. An unedited letter, dated 1385, written
in Latin and signed John, relates that ^^at Bois-le-Duc there are mar-
vellous machines, even for drawing water, beating hides, and scrap-
ing cloth. There, too, they grow flowers in glass pavilions turned
to the south.” Hothouses, which used lapis specularis, a species of
mica, instead of glass, were used by the Emperor Tiberius: but the
glass hothouse was probably an eotechnic invention. It lengthened
the growing period of Northern Europe, increased, so to say, the
climatic range of a region, and utilized solar energy which would
otherwise have been wasted: another clean gain. Even more important
for industry, glass lengthened the span of the working day in cold
or in inclement weather, particularly in the northern regions.

To have light in the dwelling house or the hothouse without being
subject to cold or rain or snow, was the great contribution to the
regularity of domestic living and business routine. This substitution
of the window for the wooden shutter, or for oiled paper and muslin,
was not fairly complete until the end of the seventeenth century: that
is, until the processes of glass-making had been improved and cheap-
ened, and the number of furnaces multiplied. Meanwhile, the prod-
uct itself had been undergoing a change toward clarification and
purification. As early as 1300 pure colorless glass was made in
Murano: a fact that is established by a law imposing a heavy punish-
ment upon the utilization of ordinary glass for eye glasses. In losing
color and ceasing to serve as picture — ^the function it had occupied
in medieval church decoration — and in letting in, instead, the forms
and colors of the outside world, glass served also as a symbol of the
double process of naturalism and abstraction which had begun to
characterize the thought of Europe. More than that: it furthered this
process. Glass helped put the world in a frame: it made it possible
to see certain elements of reality more clearly: and it focussed atten-

126 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tion on a sharply defined field — ^namely, that which was bounded

by the frame.

The medieval symbolism dissolved and the world became a
strangely different place as soon as one looked at it through glasses.
Tlie first change was effected by the use of the convex lens in specta-
cles: this corrected the flattening of the human lens due to age, and the
defect of farsightedness: Singer has suggested that the revival of
learning might in part be attributed to the number of additional years
of eyesight for reading that the spectacles gave to human life. Specta-
cles were in wide use by the fifteenth century, when, with the invention
of printing, a great need for them declared itself; and at the end
of that century the concave lens was introduced to correct near-
sightedness. Nature had provided lenses in every dew-drop and in
the gum of every balsam tree: but it remained for the eotechnic
glassmakers to utilize that fact. Roger Bacon is often given the credit
for the invention of spectacles: tlie fact is at all events that apart
from guesses and anticipations his major scientific work was in the
realm of optics.

Long before the sixteenth century, the Arabs had discovered the
use of a long tube for isolating and concentrating the field of stars
under observation: but it was a Dutch optician, Johann Lippersheim,
who in 1605 invented the telescope and thus suggested to Galileo
the efficient means he needed for making astronomical observations.
In 1590 another Hollander, the optician Zacharias Jansen invented
the compound microscope: possibly also the telescope. One invention
increased the scope of the macrocosm; the other revealed the mi-
crocosm: between them, the naive conceptions of space that the
ordinary man carried around were completely upset: one might say
that these two inventions, in terms of the new perspective, extended
the vanishing point toward infinity and increased almost infinitely
the plane of the foreground from which those lines had their point
of origin.

In the middle of the seventeenth century Leeuwenhoek, the method-
ical merchant and experimenter, through employing a distinguished
technique, became the world’s first bacteriologist. He discovered
monsters in the scrapings of his teeth more mysterious and awful than

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127

any that had been encountered in the search for the Indies. If the
glass did not actually add a new dimension to space, it extended its
area, and it filled that space with new bodies, fixed stars at unimagin-
ably vast distances, microcellular organisms whose existence was
so incredible that, but for the researches of Spallanzani, they re-
mained outside the sphere of serious investigation for over a century,
after which their existence, their partnership, their enmity, almost
became the source of a new demonology.

Glasses not merely opened people’s eyes but their minds: seeing
was believing. In the more primitive stages of thought the intuitions
and ratiocinations of authority were sacrosanct, and the person who
insisted on seeing proof of imagined events was reviled as the famous
disciple had been: he was a doubting Thomas. Now the eye became
the most respected organ. Roger Bacon refuted the superstition that
diamonds could not be broken except by using goat’s blood by resort-
ing to experiment: he fractured the stones without using blood and
reported: “I have seen this work with my own eyes.” The use of
glasses in the following centuries magnified the authority of the eye.

The development of glass had another important function. If the
new astronomy were inconceivable without it, and if bacteriology
would have been impossible, it is almost as true that chemistry would
have been severely handicapped but for this development. Professor
J. L. Myres, the classic archaeologist, has even suggested that the
backwardness of the Greeks in chemistry was due to the lack of good
glass. For glass has unique properties: not merely can it be made
transparent, but it is, for most elements and chemical compounds,
resistant to chemical change: it has the great advantage of remaining
neutral to the experiment itself, while it permits the observer to see
what is going on in the vessel. Easy to clean, easy to seal, easy to
transform in shape, strong enough so that fairly thin globes can
withstand the pressure of the atmosphere when exhausted, glass has
a combination of properties that no wood or metal or clay container
can rival. In addition it can be subjected to relatively high heats
and — ^what became important during the nineteenth century —
it is an insulator. The retort, the distilling flask, the test-tube: the
barometer, the thermometer, the lenses and the slide of the micro-

128 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

scope, the electric light, the x-ray tube, the audion — all these are
products of glass technics, and where would the sciences be without
them? A methodical analysis of temperature and pressure and the
physical constitution of matter all awaited the development of glass:
the accomplishments of Boyle, Torricelli, Pascal, Galileo, were
specifically eotechnic works. Even in medicine glass has its triumph:
the first instrument of precision to be used in diagnosis was the modi-
fication of Galileo’s thermometer that Sanctorius introduced.

There is one further property of glass that had its first full effect
in the seventeenth century. One sees it perhaps most clearly in the
homes of the Dutch, with their enormous window’s, for it was in the
Netherlands that the use of glass and its manifold applications went
farthest. Transparent glass lets in the light: it brings out, with merci-
less sincerity, moats dancing in die sunbeams and diit lurking in the
corner: for its fullest use, again, the glass itself must be clean, and
no surface can be subject to a greater degree of verifiable cleanliness
than the slick hard surface of glass. So, both by what it is and by
what it does, glass is favorable to hygiene: the clean window, the
scoured floor, the shiny utensils, are characteristic of the eotechnic
household; and the plentiful supply of water, through the introduc-
tion of canals and pumping works with water pipes for circulation
throughout the city, only made the process easier and more universal.
Sharper eyesight: a sharper interest in the external world: a sharper
response to the clarified image — ^these characteristics went hand in
hand with the widespread introduction of glass.

6: Glass and the Ego

If the outward world was changed by glass, the inner world was
likewise modified. Glass had a profound effect upon the development
of the personality: indeed, it helped to alter the very concept of the
self.

In a small way, glass had been used for mirrors by the Romans;
but the background was a dark one, and the image was no more plain
than it had been on the polished metal surface. By the sixteenth
century, even before the invention of plate glass that followed a
hundred years later, the mechanical surface of the glass had been

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129

improved to such an extent that, by coating it with a silver amalgam,
an excellent mirror could be created. Technically this was, according
to Schulz, perhaps the highest point in Venetian glass-making. Large
mirrors, accordingly, became relatively cheap and the hand-mirror
became a common possession.

For perhaps the first time, except for reflections in the water and
in the dull surfaces of metal mirrors, it was possible to find an image
that corresponded accurately to what others saw. Not merely in the
privacy of the boudoir: in another’s home, in a public gathering, the
image of the ego in new and unexpected attitudes accompanied one.
The most powerful prince of the seventeenth century created a vast
hall of mirrors, and the mirror spread from one room to another in
the bourgeois household. Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-
conversation developed with the new object itself: this preoccupation
with one’s image comes at the threshold of the mature personality
when young Narcissus gazes long and deep into the face of the pool —
and the sense of the separate personality, a perception of the objective
attributes of one’s identity, grows out of this communion.

The use of the mirror signalled the beginning of introspective
biography in the modem style: that is, not as a means of edification
but as a picture of the self, its depths, its mysteries, its inner dimen-
sions. The self in the mirror corresponds to the physical world that
was brought to light by natural science in the same epoch: it was the
self in abstracto, only part of the real self, the part that one can
divorce from the background of nature and the influential presence
of other men. But tliere is a value in this mirror personality that
more na'ive cultures did not possess. If the image one sees in the
mirror is abstract, it is not ideal or mythical: the more accurate the
physical instrument, the more sufiicient the light on it, the more
relentlessly does it show the effects of age, disease, disappointment,
frustration, slyness, covetousness, weakness — ^these come out quite
as clearly as health and joy and confidence. Indeed, when one is
completely whole and at one with the world one does not need the
mirror: it is in the period of psychic disintegration that the individual
personality turns to the lonely image to see what in fact is there
and what he can hold on to; and it was in the period of cultural

130 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

disintegration that men began to hold the mirror up to outer nature.

Who is the greatest of the introspective biographers? Where does
one find him? It is none other than Rembrandt, and it is no accident
that he was a Hollander. Rembrandt had a robust interest in the
doctors and burghers about him: as a young man he was still enough
of a guildsman and still had enough of the corporate personality to
make a pass at painting those collective portraits which the members
of the Nightwatch or the College of Physicians might commission —
although already he was playing tricks with their conventions. But
he came to the core of his art in the series of self-portraits he painted:
for it was partly from the face he found in the mirror, from the
knowledge of himself he developed and expressed in this communion,
that he achieved the insight he applied to other men. A little later
than Rembrandt, the Venice of the Alps, Annecy, harbored another
portrait painter and introspectionist, Jean Jacques Rousseau who,
more than Montaigne, was the father of the modern literary biog-
raphy and the psychological novel.

The exploration of the solitary soul, the abstract personality,
lingered on in the work of the poets and painters even after the
eotechnic complex had broken up and the artists who had once dom-
inated it were driven, by a more hostile world that was indifferent
to visual images and antipathetic to the uniqueness of the individual
soul — ^were driven to the point of complete frustration and madness.
Enough here to remark that the isolation of the world from the self
— ^the method of the physical sciences — and the isolation of the
self from the world — ^the method of introspective biography and
romantic poetry — ^were complementary phases of a single process.
Much was learnt through that dissociation: for in the act of disin-
tegrating the wholeness of human experience, the various atomic
fragments that composed it were more clearly seen and more readily
grasped. If the process itself was ultimately mad, the method that
was derived from it was valuable.

The world as conceived and observed by science, the world as
revealed by the painter, were both worlds that were seen through
and with the aid of glasses: spectacles, microscopes, telescopes,
mirrors, windows. What was the new easel picture, in fact, but a

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131

removable window opening upon an imaginary world? That acute
scientific mind, Descartes, in describing the book on natural history'
that he failed to write, mentions how he wished finally to describe
“how from these ashes, by the mere intensity of its [heat’s] action,
it formed glass: for as this transmutation of ashes into glass ap-
peared to me as wonderful as any other in nature, I took a special
pleasure in describing it.” One can well understand his delight.
Glass was in fact the peep-hole through which one beheld a new
world. Through glass some of the mysteries of nature themselves
became transparent. Is it any wonder then that perhaps tlie most
comprehensive philosopher of the seventeenth century, at home alike
in ethics and politics and science and religion, was Benedict Spinoza:
not merely a Hollander, but a polisher of lenses.

7: The Primary Inventions

Between 1000 and 1750 in Western Europe the new technics
fostered and adapted a series of fundamental inventions and dis-
coveries: they were the foundation of the rapid advances that fol-
lowed. And the speed of the ultimate movement, like the rapidity
of an army’s attack, was in proportion to the thoroughness of the
preparation. Once the breach had been made in the line, it was
easy for the rest of the army to follow through: but until that first
act had been accomplished the army, however strong and eager and
clamorous, could not move an inch. The primary inventions brought
into being something that had not existed before: mechanical clocks,
the telescope, cheap paper, print, the printing-press, tlie magnetic
compass, the scientific method, inventions which were tlie means to
fresh inventions, knowledge that was the center of expanding knowl-
edge. Some of these necessary inventions, like the lathe and the loom,
were far older than the eotechnic period: others, like the mechanical
clock, were born with the renewed impulse toward regularity and
regimentation. Only after these steps had been taken could the sec-
ondary inventions flourish: the regulation of the movement, which
made the clock more accurate, the invention of the flying shuttle,
which made the work of weaving swifter, the rotary press, which
increased the output of printed matter.

132 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Now an important point must be noted: the inventions of the
eotechnic phase were only in a minor degree the direct product of
craft skill and knowledge, proceeding out of the regular routine of
industry. The tendency of organization by crafts, regulated in the
interests of standardized and efficient work, guaranteed by local
monopolies, was on the whole conservative, although in tlie building
crafts, between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries, there were
undoubtedly many daring innovators. In the beginning, it was knowl-
edge, skill, experience, that had been the subjects of guild monopoly.
With the growth of capitalism came the bestowing of special monop-
olies, first to the chartered companies, and then to the owners of
special patents granted for specific original inventions. This was pro-
posed by Bacon in 1601 and happened first in England in 1624. From
this time on it was not the past heritage that was effectively monopo-
lized but the new departure from it.

A special inducement was offered to those whose mechanical in-
genuity supplanted tlie social and economic regulations of the guilds.
In this situation, it was natural that invention should occupy the
attention of those outside the industrial system itself — ^the military
engineer, and even the amateur in every walk of life. Invention
was a means of escaping one’s class or achieving private riches within
it: if the absolute monarch could say “L’Etat, c’est moi,” the suc-
cessful inventor could in effect say: “The Guild — ^that’s me.” While
the detailed perfection of inventions was, more often than not, the
work of skilled workers in the trade, the decisive idea was fre-
quently the work of amateurs. Mechanical inventions broke the caste-
lines of industry, even as they were later to threaten the caste-lines
of society itself.

But the most important invention of all had no direct industrial
connection whatever: namely, the invention of the experimental
method in science. This was without doubt the greatest achievement
of the eotechnic phase: its full effect upon technics did not begin to
be felt until the middle of the nineteenth century. The experimental
method, as I have already pointed out, owed a great debt to the
transformation of technics: for the relative impersonality of the new
instruments and machines, particularly the automata, must have

133

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE

helped to build up the belief in an equally impersonal world of
irreducible and brute facts, operating as independently as clockwork
and removed from the wishes of the observer: the reorganization of
experience in terms of mechanical causality and the development
of cooperative, controlled, repeatable, verifiable experiments, utiliz-
ing just such segments of reality as lent themselves to this method —
this was a gigantic labor-saving device. It cut a short straight path
through jungles of confused empiricism and laid down a rough cor-
duroy road over swamps of superstitious and wishful thinking: to
have found such a swift means of intellectual locomotion was per-
haps sufiicient excuse at the beginning for indifference to the scenery
and for contempt for everything that did not speed the journey.
None of the inventions that followed the development of the scien-
tific method were so important in remolding the thought and activity
of mankind as those that made experimental science possible. Even-
tually the scientific method was to repay its debt to technics a hun-
dredfold: two centuries later, as we shall see, it was to suggest new
combinations of means and turn into the realm of possibility the
wildest dreams and the most irresponsible wishes of the race.

For out of the hitherto almost impenetrable chaos of existence
there emerged finally, by the seventeentli century, an orderly world :
the factual, impersonal order of science, articulated in every part
and everywhere under the dominion of “natural law.” Order, even
when it was accepted as a basis for human designs, once rested
on a pure act of faith: only the stars and the planets manifested it
to the naked intelligence. Now order was supported by a method.
Nature ceased to be inscrutable, subject to demonic incursions from
another world: the very essence of Nature, as freshly conceived by
the new scientists, was that its sequences were orderly and therefore
predictable: even the path of a comet could be charted through the
sky. It was on the model of this external physical order that men
began systematically to reorganize their minds and their practical
activities: this carried further, and into every department, the pre-
cepts and the practices empirically fostered by bourgeois finance.
Like Emerson, men felt that the universe itself was fulfilled and
justified, when ships came and went with the regularity of heavenly

134 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

bodies. And they were right: there was something cosmic about it.

To have made so much order visible was no little triumph.

In mechanical invention proper, the chief eotechnic innovation was
of course the mechanical clock. By the end of the eotechnic phase,
the domestic clock had become a common part of the household
equipment, except among the poorer industrial workers and the
peasants; and the watch was one of the chief articles of ornament
carried by the well-to-do. The application of the pendulum to the
clock, by Galileo and Huyghens, increased the accuracy of the instru-
ment for common use.

But the indirect influence of clock-making was also important: as
the first real instrument of precision, it set the pattern in accuracy
and finish for all further instruments, all the more because it was
regulated by the ultimate precision of the planetary movements
themselves. In solving the problems of transmitting and regulating
motion, tlie makers of clockwork helped the general development of
fine mechanisms. To quote Usher once more: “The primary develop-
ment of the fundamental principles of applied mechanics was . . .
largely based upon the problems of the clock.” Clockmakers, along
with blacksmiths and locksmiths, were among the first machinists:
Nicholas Forq, the Frenchman who invented the planer in 1751, was
a clockmaker: Arkwright, in 1768, had the help of a Warrington
clockmaker; it was Huntsman, another clockmaker, desirous of a
more finely tempered steel for the watchspring, who invented the
process of producing crucible steel: these are only a few of the
more outstanding names. In sum, the clock was the most influential
of machines, mechanically as well as socially; and by the middle
of the eighteenth century it had become the most perfect: indeed,
its inception and its perfection pretty well delimit the eotechnic
phase. To this day, it is the pattern of fine automatism.

Second to the clock in order if not perhaps in importance was the
printing press. Its development was admirably summed up by
Carter, who did so much to clarify the historic facts. “Of all the
world’s great inventions that of printing is the most cosmopolitan and
international. China invented paper and first experimented with
block printing and moveable type. Japan produced the earliest block

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE

135

prints that are now extant. Korea first printed with type of metal,
cast from a mould. India furnished the language and religion of the
earliest block prints. People of Turkish race were among the most
important agents in carrying block printing across Asia, and the
earliest extant type are in a Turkish tongue. Persia and Egypt are
the two lands of the Near East where block printing is known to have
been done before it began in Europe. The Arabs were the agents
who prepared the way by carrying tlie making of paper from China
to Europe. . . . Florence and Italy were the first countries in Chris-
tendom to manufacture paper. As for block printing, and its advent
into Europe, Russia’s claim to have been the channel rests on the
oldest authority, though Italy’s claim is equally strong. Germany,
Italy, and the Netherlands were the earliest centers of the block
printing art. Holland and France, as well as Germany, claim to have
experimented "with type. Germany perfected the invention, and from
Germany it spread to all the world.”

The printing press and movable type were perfected by Gutenberg
and his assistants at Mainz in the fourteen-forties. An astronomical
calendar done in 1447 is the earliest datable example of Gutenberg’s
printing; but perhaps an inferior mode of printing may have been
practiced earlier by Coster in Haarlem. The decisive improvement
came with the invention of a hand-mold to cast uniform metal types.

Printing was from the beginning a completely mechanical achieve-
ment. Not merely tliat: it was the type for ail future instruments of
reproduction: for the printed sheet, even before the military uniform,
was the first completely standardized product, manufactured in se-
ries, and the movable types themselves were the first example of
completely standardized and interchangeable parts. Truly a revolu-
tionary invention in every department.

By the end of fifty years there were over a thousand public
printing presses in Germany alone, to say nothing of those in mon-
asteries and castles; and the art had spread rapidly, despite all
attempts at secrecy and monopoly, to Venice, Florence, Paris, Lon-
don, Lyons, Leipzig, and Frankfort-am-Main. While there was strong
competition from the well-established hand-copyists the art was en-
couraged by emancipation from taxes and guild regulations. Printing

136 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

lent itself to large-scale production: at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury there was in Niirnberg a large printing business with twenty-
four presses and a hundred employees — typesetters, printers, cor-
rectors, binders.

Compared with oral communication any sort of writing is a great
labor saving device, since it frees communication from the restric-
tions of time and space and makes discourse wait on the convenience
of the reader — ^who can interrupt the flow of thought or repeat it
or concentrate upon isolated parts of it. The printed page increased
the safety and permanence of the written record by manifolding it,
extended the range of communication, and economized on time and
effort. So print speedily became the new medium of intercourse:
abstracted from gesture and physical presence, the printed word
furthered that process of analysis and isolation which became the
leading achievement of eotechnic thought and which tempted Auguste
Comte to dub the whole epoch “metaphysical.” By the end of the
seventeenth century time-keeping had merged with record-keeping
in the art of communication: the news-letter, the market report, the
newspaper, the periodical followed-

More than any other device, the printed book released people
from the domination of the immediate and the local. Doing so, it
contributed further to the dissociation of medieval society: print
made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering atten-
tion on the printed word, people lost that balance between the sen-
suous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the
concrete and the abstract, which was to be achieved momentarily by
the best minds of the fifteenth century — Michelangelo, Leonardo,
Alberti — before it passed out, and was replaced by printed letters
alone. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended
gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning
and the authority of books was more widely diffused by printing, so
that if knowledge had an ampler province so, too, did error. The
divorce between print and firsthand experience was so extreme that
one of the first great modern educators, John Amos Komensky,
advocated the picture book for children as a means of restoring the
balance and providing the necessary visual associations.

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 137

But the printing press hy itself did not perform the revolution:
paper played a scarcely less important part: for its uses went far
beyond the printed page: The application of power-driven machinery
to paper production was one of the important developments of this
economy. Paper removed tlie necessity for face to face contact:
debts, deeds, contracts, news, were all committed to paper, so that,
while feudal society existed by virtue of customs that were rigorously
maintained from generation to generation, the last elements of feudal
society were abolished in England by the simple device of asking
peasants who had always had a customary share in the common
lands for some documentary proof that they had ever owned it.
Custom and memory now played second fiddle to the -written word:
reality meant “established on paper.” Was it written in the bond?
If so, it must be fulfilled. If not, it could be flouted. Capitalism, by
committing its transactions to paper, could at last make and preserve
a strict accountancy of time and money; and the new education for
the merchant classes and their helpers consisted essentially in a
mastery of the three R’s. A paper world came into existence, and
putting a thing on paper became tlie first stage in thought and action:
unfortunately also often the last.

As a space-saver, a time-saver, a labor-saver — and so ultimately
a life-saver — paper bad a uni<jue part to play in the development of
industrialism. Through the habit of using print and paper thought
lost some of its flowing, four-dimensional, organic character, and
became abstract, categorical, stereotyped, content with purely verbal
formulations and verbal solutions to problems that had never been
presented or faced in their concrete inter-relationships.

The primary mechanical inventions of the clock and the printing
press were accompanied by social inventions that were almost equally
important: die university, beginning with Bologna in 1100, Paris in
1150, Cambridge in 1229 and Salamanca in 1243: a co-operative
organization of knowledge on an international basis. The medical
school, from Salerno and Montpellier onward, was not alone the
first technical school in the modern sense; but the physicians, trained
in the natural sciences at these schools and schooled hy practice in
the observation of nature, were among the pioneers in every depart-

138 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

ment of technics and science: Paracelsus, Ambroise Pare, Cardan,
Gilbert the author of De Magnete, Harvey, Erasmus Darwin, down
to Thomas Young and Robert von Mayer were all physicians. In
the sixteenth century two further social inventions were added: the
scientific academy, first founded in the Accademia Secretorum
Naturae in Naples in 1560, and the industrial exhibition, the first
of which was held at the Rathaus in Niirnberg in 1569, the second
in Paris in 1683.

By means of the university, the scientific academy and the indus-
trial exhibition the exact arts and sciences were systematically ex-
plored, the new achievements were cooperatively exploited, and the
new lines of investigation were given a common basis. One further
important institution must be added: the laboratory. Here a new type
of environment was created, combining the resources of the cell,
the study, the library, and the workshop. Discovery and invention,
like every other form of activity, consists in the interaction of an
organism with its environment. New functions demand new environ-
ments, which tend to stimulate, concentrate, and perpetuate the
special activity. By the seventeenth century these new environments
had been created.

More direct in its effect upon technics was the creation of the
factory. Down to the nineteenth century factories were always called
mills, for what we call the factory grew out of the application of
water-power to industrial processes; and it was the existence of^a
central building, divorced from the home and the craftsman’s shop,
in which large bodies of men could be gathered to perform the
various necessary industrial operations with the benefit of large-
scale co-operation that differentiated the factory in the modem sense
from the largest of workshops. In this critical development the
Italians again led the way, as they did in canal-building and fortifi-
cation: but by the eighteenth century factories had reached the stage
of large-scale operation in Sweden, in the manufacture of hardware,
and this was true of Bolton’s later works in Birmingham.

The factory simplified the collection of raw materials and the
distribution of the finished product: it also facilitated the speciali-
zation of skill and the division of the processes of production: finally.

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE

139

by providing a common meeting place for the workers it partly over-
came the isolation and helplessness that afflicted the handicraft
worker after the structure of the town guilds had become dilapidated.
The factory had finally a double role: it was an agent of mechanical
regimentation, like the new army, and it was an example of genuine
social order, appropriate to the new processes in industry. In either
light, it was a significant invention. On one hand it gave a new motive
for capitalistic investment in the form of the joint stock company
operated for profit and it furnished the ruling classes with a powerful
weapon: on the other, it served as a center for a new kind of social
integration and made possible an efficient coordination of produc-
tion which would be valuable under any social order.

The unison and cooperation produced by these various institu-
tions, from the university to the factory, vastly increased the amount
of effective energy in society: for energy is not merely a question
of bare physical resources but of their harmonious social applica-
tion. Habits of politeness, such as the Chinese have cultivated, may
be quite as important in increasing efficiency, even measured in crude
terms of footpounds of work performed, as economic methods of
utilizing fuel: in society, as in the individual machine, failures in
lubrication and transmission may be disastrous. It was important,
for the further exploitation of the machine, that a social organization,
appropriate to the technology itself, should have been invented.
That the nineteenth century disclosed serious flaws in that organiza-
tion — as it did in its financial twin, the joint stock company — does
not lessen the importance of the original invention.

The clock and the printing press and the blast furnace were the
giant inventions of the eotechnic phase, comparable to the steam
engine in the period that followed, or the dynamo and the radio in
the neotechnic phase. But they were surrounded by a multitude of
inventions, too significant to be called minor, even when they fell
short in performance of the inventor’s expectations.

A good part of these inventions came to birth — or were further
nourished — in the fecund mind of Leonardo da Vinci. Standing in
the middle of this era, Leonardo summed up the technology of the
artisans and military engineers who preceded him and released new

140 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

stores of scientific insight and inventive ingenuity: to catalog his
inventions and discoveries is almost to outline the structure of modern
technics. He was not alone in his own time: a military engineer
himself, he utilized to the full the common stock of knowledge that
was the property of his profession: nor was he altogether without
influence upon the period that followed, for it is probable that his
manuscripts were consulted and utilized by people who did not bother
particularly to record their obligations. But in his own person,
Leonardo embodied the forces of the period that was to follow.
He made the first scientific observations of the flight of birds, de-
signed and built a flying machine, and designed the first parachute:
the conquest of space preoccupied him even though he was no more
successful than his obscure contemporary, G. B. Danti. Utilitarian
devices claimed his interest: he invented silk- winding machinery and
the alarm clock, he designed a power loom which was close to suc-
cess: he invented the wheelbarrow and the lamp chimney and the
ship’s log. Once he put before the Duke of Milan a project for the
mass production of standardized worker’s dwellings. Even the motive
of amusement was not absent: he designed water shoes. As a me-
chanic he was incomparable: the antifriction roller bearing, the
universal joint, rope and belt drives, link chains, bevel and spiral
gears, the continuous motion lathe — all these were the work of his
powerful analytic mind. Indeed, his positive genius as technician
far outdoes his cold perfection as painter.

Even on the baser side of industrial exploitation Leonardo fore-
shadowed the forces that were to come. He was preoccupied not
merely with the desire for fame but for quick financial success:
^‘Early tomorrow, Jan. 2,' 1496,” he records in one of his notes,
shall make the leather belt and proceed to a trial. . . . One hun-
dred times in each hour 400 needles will be finished, making 40,000
in an hour and 480,000 in 12 hours. Suppose we say 4000 thousands
which at 5 solidi per thousand gives 20,000 solidi: 1000 lira per
working day, and if one works 20 days in the month 60,000 ducats
the year.” These wild dreams of freedom and power through a suc-
cessful invention were to lure more than one daring mind, even
though the outcome were often to fail of realization as completely

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 141

as Leonardo’s. Add to this Leonardo’s contributions to warfare: the
steam cannon, the organ gun, the submarine, and various detailed
improvements upon the common devices of his time: inventions that
represented an interest which, so far from dying out with the growth
of industrialism, were rather substantiated and fortified by that
growth. Even in the larger issue of Leonardo’s life — ^the persistent
warfare between the engineer and the artist — ^he typified most of the
contradictions inherent in the new civilization, as it developed toward
the Faustlike exploitation of the private ego and its satisfaction by
means of financial and military and industrial power.

But Leonardo was not alone : both in his inventions and his antici-
pations he was surrounded by a gathering army of technicians and
inventors. In 1535 the first diving bell was invented by Francesco
del March! : in 1420 Joannes Fontana described a war-wagon or
tank; and in 1518 the fire-engine is mentioned in the Augsburg
Qironicles. In 1550 Palladio designed the first known suspension
bridge in Western Europe while Leonardo, before him, had designed
the drawbridge. In 1619 a tile making machine was invented; in
1680 the first power dredge was invented, and before the end of this
century a French military man, De Gennes, had invented a power
loom, while another Frenchman, the physician, Papin, had invented
the steam engine and the steamboat. [For a fuller sense of the in-
ventive richness of the eotechnic period, from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth centuries, consult the List of Inventions.]

Uiese are but samples from the great storehouse of eotechnic
invention: seeds which came to life or lay dormant in dry soil or
rocky crevices as wind and weather and chance dictated. Most of
these inventions have been attributed to a later period, partly because
they came to fruition then, partly because the first historians of the
mechanical revolution, duly conscious of the vast strides that had
been made in tlieir own generation, were ignorant of the preparation
and achievement that lay behind them, and were inclined at all
events to belittle the preparatory period. Moreover, they were often
not familiar with the manuscripts and books and artifacts that would
have set them right. Thus it happens that England has sometimes
been taken as the original home of inventions that had come into

142 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

existence much earlier in Italy. So, too, the nineteenth century pinned
on its own brows laurels that often enough belonged to the sixteenth
and the seventeenth.

Since invention is almost never the sole work of a single inventor,
however great a genius he may be, and since it is the product of the
successive labors of innumerable men, working at various times and
often toward various purposes, it is merely a figure of speech to
attribute an invention to a single person: this is a convenient false-
hood fostered by a spurious sense of patriotism and by the device
of patent monopolies — a device that enables one man to claim special
financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social
process that produced the invention. Any fully developed machine
is a composite collective product: the present weaving machinery,
according to Hobson, is a compound of about 800 inventions, while
the present carding machinery is a compound of about 60 patents.
This holds true for countries and generations as well: the joint stock
of knowledge and technical skill transcends the boundaries of indi-
vidual or national egos: and to forget that fact is not merely to
enthrone superstition but to undermine the essential planetary basis
of technology itself.

In calling attention to the scope and efi&cacy of eotechnic inven-
tions one does not seek to belittle their debt to the past and to
remoter regions — one merely wishes to show how much water had
run under the bridge before people had become generally aware
that a bridge had been built.

8: Weakness and Strength

The capital weakness of the eotechnic regime was not in the in-
efficiency of its power, still less in a lack of it; but in its irregularity.
The dependence upon strong steady winds and upon the regular
flow of water limited the spread and universalization of this economy,
for there were districts in Europe that never fully benefited by it,
and its dependence in both glass-making and metallurgy upon wood
had, by the end of the eighteenth century, brought its powers to a
low ebb. The forests of Russia and America might have delayed its
coUapse, as indeed they prolonged its reign within their own regions:

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE 143

but they could not avert the steady dissipation of its fuel supply.
Had the spoonwheel of the seventeenth century developed more rap-
idly into Fourneyron’s efficient water-turbine, water might have re-
mained the backbone of the power system until electricity had
developed sufficiently to give it a wider area of use. But before this
development could take place, the steam pumping engine had been
invented. This engine was first used outside the mine, it is interesting
to note, to raise water whose fall turned the conventional eotechnic
waterwheel in hardware factories. As society became more closely
co-ordinated on a basis of time, the interruption in its schedules
through the irregularity of wind and water was a further defect:
the wind-mill was finally defeated in Holland because it could not
conform easily to labor regulations. And as distances increased and
contracts in business emphasized the time-element, a more, regular
means of power became a financial necessity: delays and stoppages
were costly.

But there were social weaknesses within the eotechnic regime that
were equally grave. First of all, the new industries were outside
the institutional controls of the old order. Glass-making, for example,
by reason of the fact that it was always located in forested areas,
tended to escape the restrictions of the town guilds: from the first it
had a semi-capitalistic basis. Mining and iron-working, likewise, were
almost from the begiiming under a capitalistic system of production:
even when mines were not worked by means of forced or servile
labor, they were outside the control of the municipalities. Printing,
again, was not subject to guild regulations; and even the textile
industries escaped to the country: the factor who gave his name to
the factory was a trader who farmed out the raw materials, and
sometimes the necessary machines of production, and who bought up
the product. The new industries, as Mantoux points out, tended to
escape the manufacturing regulations of the guilds and even of the
State itself — such as the English Statute of Apprentices of 1563:
they grew up without social control. In other words, mechanical im-
provements flourished at the expense of the human improvements
that had been strenuously introduced by the craft guilds; and the
latter, in turn, were steadily losing force by reason of the growth

144 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of capitalistic monopolies which produced a steadily widening gap
between masters and men. The machine had an anti-social bias: it
tended by reason of its '‘‘progressive” character to the more naked
forms of human exploitation.

Both the strength and the weakness of the eotechnic regime can
in fact be witnessed in the technical development and the social
dissolution and decay that took place in the textile industries, which
were the backbone of the old economy.

Along with mining, the textile industries recorded the greatest
number of improvements. While spinning with the distaff was carried
on far into the seventeenth century, the spinning wheel had made
its way into Europe from India by 1298. Within another century
spinning mills and fulling mills had been introduced: by the six-
teenth century, according to Usher, the fulling mills were also used
as communal washing-machines: the fuller in his spare time did the
village washing. Leonardo made the important invention of the flyer
for spindles around 1490, and an authority on textiles, Mr. M. D. C.
Crawford goes so far as to say that "without this inspired drawing
we might have had no subsequent developments of textile machinery
as we now know it.” Johann Jurgen, a wood-carver of Brunswick,
invented a partly automatic spinning wheel with a flier around 1530.

After Leonardo a succession of inventors worked on the power-
loom. But the device that made it possible was Kay’s flying shuttle,
which greatly increased the productive capacity of the hand-loom
weaver over eighty years before steam power was successfully ap-
plied to the automatic loom. This work was partly anticipated in
the narrow-width ribhon loom, first invented in Danzig and then
introduced into Holland; but the development of the power loom,
through Bell and Monteith, was properly speaking a product of the
paleotechnic phase, and Cartwright, the clergyman who usually gets
full credit for its invention, played only an incidental role in the
long chain of improvements that made it possible. While silk was
spun by machinery in the fourteenth century, the first successful
cotton spinning machine was not built until 1733 and patented in
1738, at a time when industry was still employing water power for
prime movers. This series of inventions was in fact the final bequest

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145

of the eotechnic phase. Sombart marks the turning point of capitalism
in the transfer of the center of gravity from the organic textile indus-
tries to the inorganic mining industries: that likewise marks the
transition from the eotechnic to the paleotechnic economy.

One further set of inventions in the textile industry must be noted:
the invention of knitting machinery in the sixteenth century. The
origins of hand-knitting are obscure; if the art existed it played but
a minor part before the fifteenth century. Knitting is not only perhaps
the most distinctively European contribution to the textile industries
but it was one of the first to be mechanized as the result of the inven-
tion of the knitting frame by another ingenious English clergyman.
By taking advantage of the elasticity of yams, knitting creates textiles
which adapt themselves to the contours of the body and flex and
contract with the movements of the muscles; while by adding to the
amount of air-space within the yam itself and between the strands,
it increases warmth without adding to the weight. Knitted hose and
undergarments — to say nothing of the wider use of the lighter wash-
able cottons for body clothes — are all distinctly eotechnic contribu-
tions to comfort and cleanliness.

While the textile industries exhibited the steady advance of inven-
tion long before the introduction of the steam engine, they likewise
witnessed the degradation of labor through the displacement of skill
and through the breakdown of political control over the processes of
production. The first characteristic is perhaps best seen in the indus-
tries where the division of the process could be carried farther than
in the textile industries.

Manu-facture, that is, organized and partitioned handwork car-
ried on in large establishments with or without power-machines,
broke down the process of production into a series of specialized
operations. Each one of these was carried on by a specialized worker
whose facility was increased to the extent that his function was lim-
ited. This division was, in fact, a sort of empirical analysis of the
working process, analyzing it out into a series of simplified human
motions which could then be translated into mechanical operations.
Once this analysis was performed, the rebuilding of the entire
sequence of operations into a machine became more feasible. The

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

mechanization of human labor was, in effect, the first step toward the
humanization of the machine — ^humanization in the sense of giving
the automaton some of the mechanical equivalents of life-likeness.
The immediate effect of this division of process was a monstrous
dehumanization: the worst drudgeries of craftsmanship can hardly
be compared to it. Marx has summed up the process admirably.

“Whereas,” Marx writes, “simple cooperation leaves the indi-
vidual’s methods of work substantially unaltered; manufacture revo-
lutionizes these methods and cuts at the root of individual labor
power. It transforms the worker into a cripple, a monster, by forcing
him to develop some highly specialized dexterity at the cost of a
world of productive impulses and faculties — ^much as in Argentina
they slaughter a whole beast simply in order to get his hide or tallow.
Not merely are the various partial operations allotted to different
individuals; but the individual himself is split up, is transformed
into the automatic motor of some partial operation. ... To begin
with the worker sells his labor power to capital because he himself
lacks the material means requisite to the production of a commodity.
But now his labor power actually renounces work unless it is sold
to capital.”

Here was both the process and the result which came about through
the increased use of power and machinery in the eotechnic period.
It marked the end of the guild system and the beginning of the wage
worker. It marked the end of internal workshop discipline, admin-
istered by masters and journeymen through a system of apprentice-
ship, traditional teaching, and the corporate inspection of the prod-
uct; while it indicated the beginning of an external discipline im-
posed by the worker and manufacturer in the interest of private
profit — a system which lent itself to adulteration and to deteriorated
standards of production almost as much as it lent itself to technical
improvements. All this was a large step downward. In the textile
industries the descent was rapid and violent during the eighteenth
century.

In sum: as industry became more advanced from a mechanical
point of view it at first became more backward from a human stand-
point. Advanced agriculture, as practiced on the large estates toward

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147

the end of this period, sought to establish, as Arthur Yoimg pointed
out, the same standards in the field as had come to prevail in the
workshop: specialization and division of process. If one wishes to
view the eotechnic period at its best, one should perhaps behold it
in the thirteenth century, before this process had set in: or at latest,
at the end of the sixteenth century, when the ordinary worker, though
still losing ground, losing freedom and self-control and substance,
was unruly and resourceful — still capable of fighting or colonizing
rather than ready to submit to the yoke of either becoming a machine
or competing at sweated labor with the products of the machine.
It remained for the nineteenth century to accomplish this final
degradation.

But while one cannot ignore the defects of the eotechnic economy,
including the fact that more powerful and accurate engines of de-
struction and exquisite apparatus for human torture were both put
at the service of morbid ambitions and a corrupt ideology — ^while
one cannot ignore these things one must not under-rate the real
achievements. The new processes did save human labor and dimin-
ish — as the Swedish industrialist Polhem pointed out at the time —
the amount and intensity of manual work. This result was achieved
by the substitution of water-power for handwork, “with gains of
100 or even 1000 per cent in relative costs.” It is easy to put a low
estimate on the gains if one applies merely a quantitative measuring
stick to them: if one compares the millions of horsepower now avail-
able to the thousands that then existed, if one compares the vast
amount of goods poured forth by our factories with the modest
output of the older workshops. But to judge the two economies cor-
rectly, one must also have a qualitative standard: one must ask not
merely how much crude energy went into it, but how much of that
went into the production of durable goods. Tbie energy of the
eotechnic regime did not vanish in smoke nor were its products
thrown quickly on junk-heaps: by the seventeenth century it had
transformed the woods and swamps of northern Europe into a con-
tinuous vista of wood and field, village and garden: an ordered
human landscape replaced the bare meadows and the matted forests,
while the social necessities of man had created hundreds of new cities.

148 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

solidly built and commodiously arranged, cities whose spaciousness
and order and beauty still challenge, even in their decay, the squalid
anarchy of the new towns that succeeded them. In addition to the
rivers, there were hundreds of miles of canals: in addition to the
made lands of the north coastal area, there were harbors arranged
for safety, and the beginnings of a lighthouse system. All these were
solid achievements: works of art whose well-wrought forms stayed
the process of entropy and postponed the final reckoning that all
human things must make.

During this period the machine was adequately complemented by
the utility: if the watermill made more power available the dyke and
the drainage ditch created more usable soil. If the canal aided
transport, the new cities aided social intercourse. In every depart-
ment of activity there was equilibrium between the static and the
dynamic, between the rural and the urban, between the vital and
the mechanical. So it is not merely in the annual rate of converting
energy or the annual rate of production that one must gauge the gains
of the eotechnic period: many of its artifacts are still in use and
still almost as good as new; and when one takes account of the
longer span of time enjoyed by eotechnic products the balance tips
back toward its own side of the arm. What it lacked in power, it
made up for in time: its works had durability. Nor did the eotechnic
period lack time any more than it lacked energy: far from moiling
day and night to achieve as much as it did, it enjoyed in Catholic
countries about a hundred complete holidays a year.

How rich the surplus of energies was by the seventeenth century
one may partly judge by the high state of horticulture in Holland:
when food is scarce one does not grow flowers to take its place. And
wherever the new industry made its way during this period it directly
enriched and improved the life of the community; for the services
of art and culture, instead of being paralyzed by the increasing
control over the environment, were given fuller sustenance. Can any-
thing else account for the outburst of the arts during the Renascence,
at a moment when the culture that supported them was so weak-
spirited and the ostensible impulses so imitative and derivative?

The goal of the eotechnic civilization as a whole until it reached

THE EOTECHNIC PHASE

149

the decadence of the eighteenth century was not more power alone
but a greater intensification of life: color, perfume, images, music,
sexual ecstasy, as well as daring exploits in arms and thought and
exploration. Fine images were everywhere: a field of tulips in bloom,
the scent of new mown hay, the ripple of flesh under silk or the
rondure of budding breasts: the rousing sting of the wind as the
rain clouds scud over the seas, or the blue serenity of the sky and
cloud, reflected with crystal clarity on the velvety surface of canal and
pond and watercourse. One by one the senses were refined. Toward
the end of this period the repetitious courses of the medieval dinner
were analyzed out into the procession of foods that pass from the
appetizer which rouses the necessary secretions to the sweet that
signifies ultimate repletion. The touch, too, was refined: silks became
commoner and the finest Dacca muslins from India took the place
of coarse wools and linens: similarly the delicate smooth-surfaced
Chinese porcelain supplemented the heavier Delft and Majolica and
common earthenware.

Flowers in every garden improved the sensitiveness of the eye and
the nose, making them quicker to take offense at the dungheap and
the human ordure, and re-enforcing the general habits of household
order and cleanliness that came in with eotechnic improvements.
As early as Agricola’s time he observes that “the place that Nature
has provided with a river or stream can be made serviceable for
many things; for water will never be wanting and can be carried
through wooden pipes to baths in dwelling-houses.” Refinement of
smell was carried to such a pitch that it suggested Father Castel’s
clavecin des odeurs. One did not touch books or prints with dirty
greasy hands: the well-thumbed books of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries are still with us to prove it.

Re-enforcing the sense of cleanliness and this refinement of touch
and taste, even in the kitchen, the first few rough iron pots gave way
to copper pots and pans that were brought to a mirror-like ^iolish
by the industrious kitchen wench or housewife. But above all, during
this period the eye was trained and refined: the delight of the eye
even served other functions than pure vision by retarding them and
giving the observer a chance to enter into them more fully. The wine-

150 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

drinker gazed thoughtfully at the color of the wine before he supped
it, and the lover’s courtship became more intense, as well as more
prolonged, as the visual pleasure of his beloved distracted him for
a moment from the desire for possession. The wood-cut and the
copper plate were popular arts during this period: even a great part
of the vulgar work had affiliations to good form, and much of it had
genuine distinction, while painting was one of the dominant expres-
sions of the intellectual as well as the emotional life. Throughout
life, alike for rich and poor, the spirit of play was imderstood and
fostered. If the gospel of work took form during this period, it did
not dominate it.

This great dilation of the senses, this more acute response to
external stimuli, was one of the prime fruits of the eotechnic culture:
it is still a vital part of the tradition of Western culture. Tempering
the eotechnic tendency toward intellectual abstractionism, these sen-
sual expressions formed a profound contrast to the contraction and
starvation of the senses which had characterized the religious codes
that preceded it, and was to characterize once more much of the
doctrines and life of the nineteenth century. Culture and technics,
though intimately related to each other through the activities of living
men, often lie like non-conformable strata in geology, and, so to say,
weather differently. During the greater part of the eotechnic period,
however, they were in relative harmony. Except perhaps on the mine
and the battlefield, they were both predominantly in the service of
life. The rift between the mechanization and humanization, between
power bent on its own aggrandizement and power directed toward
wider human fulfillment had already appeared: but its consequences
had still to become fully visible.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

1 : England’s Belated Leadership

By the middle of the eighteenth century the fundamental industrial
revolution, that which transformed our mode of thinking, our means
of production, our manner of living, had been accomplished: the
external forces of nature were harnessed and the mills and looms and
spindles were working busily through Western Europe. The time
had come to consolidate and systematize the great advances that
had been made.

At this moment the eotechnic regime was shaken to its foundations.
A new movement appeared in industrial society which had been
gathering headway almost unnoticed from the fifteenth century on:
after 1750 industry passed into a new phase, with a diSerent source
of power, different materials, different social objectives. This second
revolution multiplied, vulgarized, and spread the methods and goods
produced by the first: above all, it was directed toward the quantifica-
tion of life, and its success could be gauged only in terms of the
multiplication table.

For a whole century the second industrial revolution, which Geddes
called the paleotechnic age, has received credit for many of the ad-
vances that were made during the centuries that preceded it. In
contrast to the supposedly sudden and inexplicable outburst of inven-
tions after 1760 the previous seven hundred years have often been
treated as a stagnant period of small-scale petty handicraft produc-
tion, feeble in power resources and barren of any significant accom-
plishments. How did this notion become popular? One reason, I

think, is that the critical change that actually did take place during

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152 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZAIION

the eighteenth century threw into shadow the older technical meth-
ods: but perhaps the main reason is that this- change took place first
and most swiftly in England, and the observations of the new in-
dustrial methods, after Adam Smith — ^who was too early to appraise
the transformation — ^were made by economists who were ignorant
of the technical history of Western Europe, or who were inclined to
belittle its significance. The historians failed to appreciate the debt
of England's navy under Henry VIII to Italian shipbuilders, of her
mining industry to imported German miners, of her waterworks and
land-clearance schemes to Dutch engineers, and her silk spinning
mills to the Italian models which were copied by Thomas Lombe.

The fact is that England, throughout the Middle Ages, was one of
the backward countries of Europe: it was on the outskirts of the
great continental civilization and it shared in only a limited way in
the great industrial and civic development that took place in the
South from the tenth century onward. As a wool-raising center, in
the time of Henry VIII, England was a source of raw materials,
rather than a well-rounded agricultural and manufacturing country;
and with the destruction of the monasteries by the same monarch,
England’s backwardness was only accentuated- It was not until the
sixteenth century that various traders and enterprisers began to de-
velop mines and mills and glassworks on any considerable scale.
Few of the decisive inventions or improvements of the eotechnic
phase — one excepts knitting — ^had their home in England. England’s
first great contribution to the new processes of thought and work came
through the marvellous galaxy of distinguished scientists it produced
in the seventeenth century: Gilbert, Napier, Boyle, Harvey, Newton,
and Hooke. Not until the eighteenth century did England participate
in any large degree in the eotechnic advances: the horticulture, the
landscape gardening, the canal building, even the factory organiza-
tion of that period, correspond to developments that had taken place
from one to three centuries earlier in other parts of Europe.

Since the eotechnic regime had scarcely taken root in England,
there was less resistance there to new methods and new processes: the
break with the past came more easily, perhaps, because there was

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 153

less to break with. England’s original backwardness helped to estab-
lish her leadership in the paleotechnic phase.

2: The New Barbarism

As we have seen, the earlier technical development had not in-
volved a complete breach with the past. On the contrary, it had seized
and appropriated and assimilated the technical innovations of other
cultures, some very ancient, and the pattern of industry was wrought
into the dominant pattern of life itself. Despite all the diligent min-
ing for gold, silver, lead and tin in the sixteenth century, one could
not call the civilization itself a mining civilization; and the handi-
craftsman’s world did not change completely when he walked from
the workshop to the church, or left the garden behind his house to
wander out into the open fields beyond the city’s walls.

Paleotechnic industry, on the other hand, arose out of the break-
down of European society and carried the process of disruption to a
finish. There was a sharp shift in interest from life values to
pecuniary values : the system of interests which only had been latent
and which had been restricted in great measure to the merchant and
leisure classes now pervaded every walk of life. It was no longer
sufficient for industry to provide a livelihood: it must create an
independent fortune: work was no longer a necessary part of living:
it became an all-important end. Industry shifted to new regional
centers in England: it tended to slip away from the established cities
and to escape to decayed boroughs or to rural districts which were
outside the field of regulation. Bleak valleys in Yorkshire that sup-
plied water power, dirtier bleaker valleys in other parts of the land
which disclosed seams of coal, became the environment of the new
industrialism. A landless, traditionless proletariat, which had heen
steadily gathering since the sixteenth century, was drawn into these
new areas and put to work in these new industries: if peasants were
not handy, paupers were supplied by willing municipal authorities:
if male adults could be dispensed with, women and children were
used. These new mill villages and milltowns, barren of even the dead
memorials of an older humaner culture, knew no other round and
suggested no other outlet, than steady unremitting toil. The opera-

154 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tions themselves were repetitive and monotonous; the environment
was sordid; the life that was lived in these new centers was empty
and barbarous to the last degree. Here the break with the past was
complete. People lived and died within sight of the coal pit or the
cotton mill in which they spent from fourteen to sixteen hours of
their daily life, lived and died without either memory or hope, happy
for the crusts that kept them alive or the sleep that brought them the
brief uneasy solace of dreams.

Wages, never far above the level of subsistence, were driven down
in the new industries by the competition of the machine. So low
were they in the early part of the nineteenth century that in the textile
trades they even for a while retarded the introduction of the power
loom. As if the surplus of workers, ensured by the disfranchisement
and pauperization of the agricultural workers, were not enough to
re-enforce the Iron Law of Wages, there was an extraordinary rise
in the birth-rate. The causes of this initial rise are still obscure; no
present theory fully accounts for it. But one of the tangible motives
was the fact that unemployed parents were forced to live upon the
wages of the young they had begotten. From the chains of poverty
and perpetual destitution there was no escape for the new mine
worker or factory worker; the servility of the mine, deeply engrained
in that occupation, spread to all the accessory employments. It needed
both luck and cunning to escape those shackles.

Here was something almost without parallel in the history of
civilization: not a lapse into barbarism through the enfeeblement of
a higher civilization, but an upthrust into barbarism, aided by the
very forces and interests which originally had been directed toward
the conquest of the environment and the perfection of human cul-
ture. Where and under what conditions did this change take place?
And how, when it represented in fact the lowest point in social de-
velopment Europe had known since the Dark Ages did it come to
be looked upon as a humane and beneficial advance? We must answer
those questions.

The phase one here defines as paleotechnic reached its highest
point, in terms of its own concepts and ends, in England in the middle
of the nineteenth century; its cock-crow of triumph was the great in-

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 155

dustrial exhibition in the new Crystal Palace at Hyde Park in 1851 :
the first World Exposition, an apparent victory for free trade, free
enterprise, free invention, and free access to all the world’s markets
by the country that boasted already that it was the workshop of the
world. From around 1870 onwards the typical interests and preoccu-
pations of the paleotechnic phase have been challenged by later
developments in technics itself, and modified by various counter-
poises in society. But like the eotechnic phase, it is still with us:
indeed, in certain parts of the world, like Japan and China, it even
passes for the new, the progressive, the modem, while in Russia an
unfortunate residue of paleotechnic concepts and methods has helped
misdirect, even partly cripple, the otherwise advanced economy
projected by the disciples of Lenin. In the United States the paleo-
technic regime did not get under way until the eighteen fifties, almost
a century after England; and it reached its highest point at the be-
ginning of the present century, whereas in Germany it dominated the
years between 1870 and 1914, and, being carried to perhaps fuller
and completer expression, has collapsed with greater rapidity there
than in any other part of the world. France, except for its special
coal and iron centers, escaped some of the worst defects of the period ;
while Holland, like Denmark and in part Switzerland, skipped almost
directly from an eotechnic into a neotechnic economy, and except in
ports like Rotterdam and in the mining districts, vigorously resisted
the paleotechnic blight.

In short, one is dealing with a technical complex that cannot be
strictly placed within a time belt; but if one takes 1700 as a begin-
ning, 1870 as the high point of the upward curve, and 1900 as the
start of an accelerating downward movement, one will have a suffi-
ciently close approximation to fact. Without accepting any of the
implications of Henry Adams’s attempt to apply the phase rule of
physics to the facts of history, one may grant an increasing rate of
change to the processes of invention and technical improvement, at
least up to the present; and if eight hundred years almost defines
the eotechnic phase, one should expect a much shorter term for the
paleotechnic one.

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

3: Carboniferous Capitalism

The great shift in population and industry that took place in the
eighteenth century was due to the introduction of coal as a source
of mechanical power, to the use of new means of making that power
effective — ^the steam engine — and to new methods of smelting and
working up iron. Out of this coal and iron complex, a new civiliza-
tion developed.

Like so many other elements in the new technical world, the use
of coal goes back a considerable distance in history. There is a refer-
ence to it in Theophrastus: in 320 B.c. it was used by smiths; while
the Chinese not merely used coal for baking porcelain but even
employed natural gas for illumination. Coal itself is a tmique min-
eral: apart from the precious metals, it is one of the few unoxidized
substances found in nature; at the same time it is one of the most
easy to oxidize: weight for weight it is of course much more compact
to store and transport than wood.

As early as 1234 the freemen of Newcastle were given a charter
to dig for coal, and an ordinance attempting to regulate the coal nui-
sance in London dates from the fourteenth century. Five hundred
years later coal was in general use as a fuel among glassmakers,
brewers, distillers, sugar bakers, soap boilers, smiths, dyers, brick-
makers, lime burners, fotmders, and calico printers. But in the mean-
while a more significant use had been found for coal : Dud Dudley at
the beginning of the seventeenth century sought to substitute coal for
charcoal in the production of iron: this aim was successfully accom-
plished by a Quaker, Abraham Darby, in 1709. By that inveution
the high-powered blast furnace became possible; but the method it-
self did not make its way to Coalbrookdale in Shropshire to Scotland
and the North of England until the 1760’s. The next development
in the making of cast-iron awaited the introduction of a pump which
should deliver to the furnace a more effective blast of air: this came
with the invention of Watt’s steam pump, and the demand for more
iron, which followed, in turn increased the demand for coal.

Meanwhile, coal as a fuel for both domestic heating and power
was started on a new career. By the end of the eighteenth century

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

157

coal began to take the place of current sources of energy as an
illuminant through Murdock’s devices for producing illuminating
gas. Wood, wind, water, beeswax, tallow, sperm-oil — all these were
displaced steadily by coal and derivatives of coal, albeit an efficient
type of burner, that produced by Welsbach, did not appear until
electricity was ready to supplant gas for illumination. Coal, which
could be mined long in advance of use, and which could be stored
up, placed industry almost out of reach of seasonal influences and the
caprices of the weather.

In the economy of the earth, the large-scale opening up of coal
seams meant that industry was beginning to live for the first time
on an accumulation of potential energy, derived from the ferns of
the carboniferous period, instead of upon current income. In the
abstract, mankind entered into the possession of a capital inherit-
ance more splendid than all the wealth of the Indies; for even at the
present rate of use it has been calculated that the present known
supplies would last three thousand years. In the concrete, however,
the prospects were more limited, and the exploitation of coal carried
with it penalties not attached to the extraction of energy from grow-
ing plants or from wind and water. As long as the coal seams of
England, Wales, the Ruhr, and the Alleghanies were deep and rich
the limited terms of this new economy could be overlooked: but as
soon as the first easy gains were realized the difficulties of keeping up
the process became plain. For mining is a robber industry: the mine
owner, as Messrs. Tryon and Eckel point out, is constantly consuming
his capital, and as the surface measures are depleted the cost per
unit of extracting minerals and ores becomes greater. The mine is
the worst possible local base for a permanent civilization: for when
the seams are exhausted, the individual mine must be closed down,
leaving behind its debris and its deserted sheds and houses. The by-
products are a befouled and disorderly environment; the end prod-
uct is an exhausted one.

Now, the sudden accession of capital in the form of these vast
coal fields put mankind in a fever of exploitation: coal and iron were
the pivots upon which the other functions of society revolved. The
activities of the nineteenth century were consumed by a series of

158 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

ruslies — ^the gold rushes, the iron rushes, the copper rushes, the
petroleum rushes, the diamond rushes. The animus of mining af-
fected the entire economic and social organism: this dominant mode
of exploitation became the pattern for subordinate forms of industry.
The reckless, get-rich-quick, devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of the
mining rushes spread everywhere: the bonanza farms of the Middle
West in the United States were exploited as if they were mines, and
the forests were gutted out and mined in the same fashion as the
minerals that lay in their hills. Mankind behaved like a drunken
heir on a spree. And the damage to form and civilization through
the prevalence of these new habits of disorderly exploitation and
wasteful expenditure remained, whether or not the source of energy
itself disappeared. The psychological results of carboniferous capi-
talism — ^the lowered morale, the expectation of getting something for
nothing, the disregard for a balanced mode of production and con-
sumption, the habituation to wreckage and debris as part of the nor-
mal human environment — all these results were plainly mischievous.

4: The Steam Engine

In all its broader aspects, paleotechnic industry rested on the
mine: the products of the mine dominated its life and determined
its characteristic inventions and improvements.

From the mine came the steam pump and presently the steam
engine: ultimately the steam locomotive and so, by derivation, the
steamboat. From the mine came the escalator, the elevator, which
was first utilized elsewhere in the cotton factory, and the subway for
urban transportation. The railroad likewise came directly from the
mine: roads with wooden rails were laid down in Newcastle, England,
in 1602: but they were common in the German mines a hundred
years before, for they enabled the heavy ore carts to be moved easily
over the rough and otherwise impassable surface of the mine. Around
1716 these wooden ways were capped with plates of malleable iron;
and in 1767 cast iron bars were substituted. (Feldhaus notes that
the invention of iron-clad wooden rails is illustrated at the time of
the Hussite Wars around 1430: possibly the invention of a military
engineer.) The combination of the railroad, the train of cars, and the

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 159

locomotive, first used in the mines at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, was applied to passenger transportation a generation later.
Wherever the iron rails and wooden ties of this new system of loco-
motion went, the mine and the products of the mine went with it:
indeed, the principal product carried by railroads is coal. The nine-
teenth century town became in effect — and indeed in appearance — an
extension of the coal mine: The cost of transporting coal naturally
increases with distance: hence the heavy industries tended to con-
centrate near the coal measures. To be cut off from the coal mine
was to be cut off from the source of paloetechnic civilization.

In 1791, less than a generation after Watt had perfected the steam
engine. Dr. Erasmus Darwin, whose poetic fancies were to become
the leading ideas of the next century, apostrophized the new powers
in the following verses:

Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

Or on wide-UMving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the fields of air.

Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above.

Shall ivave their flutfring kerchiefs as they move
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd.

And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

His perceptions were quick and his anticipations were just. The
technical history of the next hundred years was directly or indirectly
the history of steam.

The need for more efficient mining which could reach the deeper
seams prompted the effort to devise a more powerful pump than
human labor or horse could work, and more regular and more acces-
sible than wind or water mills: this was necessary to clear the gal-
leries of water. The translation of Hero’s Pneumatics, which contains
devices for using steam, was published in Europe in 1575, and a
series of inventors in the sixteenth century. Porta, Cardan, De Cans
made various suggestions for using the power of steam to perform
work. A century later the second Marquis of Worcester busied him-
self with the invention of a steam pumping engine (1630), thus

160 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

transforming the instrument from a scientific toy into a practical
mechanism. In 1633 the Marquis was granted a patent for his Vater-
commanding” engine, and he purposed to develop a water works for
supplying water to the inhabitants of London. Nothing came of this;
but the work was carried further by Thomas Savery whose device,
called The Miner’s Friend, was first publicized in 1698.

Dr. Papin, in France, had been working on the same lines: he
described his engine as a ‘^^new means to create considerable motive
power at low prices”: the purpose was clear enough. Following up
Papin’s work, Newcomen, in 1712, erected an improved type of
pumping engine. While the Newcomen engine was clumsy and ineffi-
cient, since it lost enormous quantities of heat in effecting condensa-
tion, it exceeded in power any single earlier prime mover, and
through the application of steam power at the very source of energy,
the coal mine itself, it was possible to sink the mines deeper and
still keep them free of water. The main lines of the invention were
laid down before Watt came upon the scene. It was his mission, not
to invent the steam engine, but to raise considerably its efficiency by
creating a separate condensing chamber and by utilizing the expan-
sive pressure of the steam itself. Watt worked on the steam engine
from 1765 on, applied for a patent in 1769, and between 1775 and
1800 erected 289 engines in England. His earlier steam engines were
all pumps. Not until 1781 did Watt devote himself to inventing a
rotary prime mover; and the answer to this problem was the great
double-action fifty horsepower engine that his firm installed in the
Albion Flour Mill in 1786, following the ten horsepower engine he
first made for use in a brewery in London. In less than twenty years,
so great was the demand for power, he installed 84 engines in cotton
mills, 9 in wool and worsted mills, 18 in canal-works and 17 in
breweries.

Watt’s improvement of the steam engine in turn required improve-
ments in the metallurgical arts. The machine work of his day in
England was extremely inaccurate, and in boring cylinders for his
engine he was obliged to "'tolerate errors in his cylinders amounting
to the thickness of a little finger in a cylinder 28 inches in diameter.”
So the demand for better engines, leading to Wilkinson’s boring ma-

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 161

chine about 1776, and to Maudslay’s numerous inventions and sim-
plifications a generation later — including his perfection of the French
slide rest for the lathe — gave a great stimulus to the machine crafts.
Incidentally, the Albion Mills, designed by Rennie, were not merely
the first to use steam for grinding wheat, but are supposed to have
been the first important establishment in which every piece of the
plant and equipment, axles, wheels, pinions, and shafts, was made
of metal.

In more than one department, then, the 1780’s mark the definite
crystallization of the paleotechnic complex: Murdock’s steam car-
riage, Cort’s reverberatory furnace, Wilkinson’s iron boat, Cart-
wright’s power loom, and Joufiroy’s and Fitch’s steamboats, the lat-
ter with a screw propeller, date back to this decade.

The whole technique of wood had now to be perfected in the
more difficult, refractory material — iron. The change from eotechnic
to paleotechnic of course passed through transitional stages; but it
could not remain at a halfway point. Though in America and Russia
wood might, for example, be used right up to the third quarter of
the nineteenth century for locomotives and steamboats, the need for
coal developed with the larger and larger demands for fuel that the
universalization of the machine carried with it. The very fact that
Watt’s steam engine consumed about eight and a half pounds of coal
per horsepower, in comparison with Smeaton’s atmospheric engine,
which had used almost sixteen pounds, only increased the demand
for more of Watt’s kind, and widened the area of exploitation. The
water-turbine was not perfected till 1832: in the intervening two
generations steam had won supremacy, and it remained the symbol
of increased efficiency. Even in Holland the efficient steam engine
was presently introduced to assist in the Zuyder Zee reclamation:
once the new scale, the new magnitudes, the new regularities were
established, wind and water power could not without further aid com-
pete with steam.

But note an important difference: the steam engine tended toward
monopoly and concentration. Wind and water power were free; but
coal was expensive and the steam engine itself was a costly invest-
ment; so, too, were the machines that it turned. Twenty-four hour

162 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

operations, which characterized the mine and the blast furnace, now
came into other industries which had heretofore respected the limita-
tions of day and night. Moved by a desire to earn every possible
sum on their investments, the textile manufacturers lengthened the
working day: and whereas in England in the fifteenth century it
had been fourteen or fifteen hours long in mid-summer with from
two and a half to three hours allowed for recreation and meals, in
the new milltowns it was frequently sixteen hours long all the year
round, with a single hour ofi for dinner. Operated by the steam
engine, lighted by gas, the new miUs could work for twenty-four
hours. Why not the worker? The steam engine was pacemaker.

Since the steam engine requires constant care on the part of the
stoker and engineer, steam power was more efficient in large units
than in small ones: instead of a score of small units, working when
required, one large engine was kept in constant motion. Thus steam
power fostered the tendency toward large industrial plants already
present in the subdivision of the manufacturing process. Great size,
forced by the nature of the steam engine, became in turn a symbol
of efficiency. The industrial leaders not only accepted concentration
and magnitude as a fact of operation, conditioned by the steam
engine: they came to believe in it by itself, as a mark of progress.
With the big steam engine, the big factory, the big bonanza farm, the
big blast furnace, efficiency was supposed to exist in direct ratio to
size. Bigger was another way of saying better.

But the steam engine tended toward concentration and bigness in
still another way. Though the railroad increased travel distances and
the amount of locomotion and transportation, it worked within rela-
tively narrow regional limits; the poor performance of the railroad
on grades over two per cent caused the new lines to follow the water-
courses and valley bottoms. This tended to drain the population out
of the back country, that had been served during the eotechnic phase
by high roads and canals: with the integration of the railroad system
and the growth of international markets, population tended to heap
up in the great terminal cities, the junctions, the port towns. The
main line express services tended to further this concentration, and
the feeder lines and cross country services ran down, died out, or

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 163

were deliberately extirpated: to travel across country it was often
necessary to go twice the distance through a central town and hack
again, hairpinwise.

Though the steam carriage was invented and put into use on the old
coaching roads in England before the railroad, it never successfully
challenged it: for a British act of Parliament drove it off the roads
as soon as the railroad appeared on the scene. Steam power thus
increased the areas of cities; it also increased the tendency of the
new urban communities to coalesce along the main line of transpor-
tation and travel. That purely physical massing of population to
which Patrick Geddes gave the name conurbation, was a direct prod-
uct of the coal-and-iron regime. It must be distinguished carefully
from the social formation of the city, to which it hears a casual
resemblance by reason of its concentration of buildings and people*
The prosperity of these new areas was measured in terms of the size
of their new factories, the size of the population, the current rate of
growth. In every way, then, the steam engine accentuated and deep-
ened that quantification of life which had been taking place slowly
and in every department during the three centuries that had preceded
its introduction. By 1852 the railroad had reached the East Indies: by
1872 Japan and by 1876 China. Wherever it went it carried the
methods and ideas of this mining civilization along with it.

5: Blood and Iron

Iron and coal dominated the paleotechnic period. Their color
spread everywhere, from grey to black: the black boots, the black
stove-pipe hat, the black coach or carriage, the black iron frame of
the hearth, the black cooking pots and pans and stoves. Was it mourn-
ing? Was it protective coloration? Was it mere depression of the
senses? No matter what the original color of the paleotechnic milieu
might be, it was soon reduced, by reason of the soot and cinders that
accompanied its activities, to its characteristic tones, grey, dirty
brown, black. The center of the new industrialism in England was
appropriately called the Black Country: by 1850 there was a similar
blackness around the Pittsburgh district in America, and presently
there was another in the Ruhr and around Lille.

164 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Iron became the universal material. One went to sleep in an iron
bed and washed one’s face in the morning in an iron washbowl: one
practiced gymnastics with the aid of iron dumb-bells or other iron
weight-lifting apparatus; one played billiards on an iron billiard
table^ made by Messrs. Sharp and Roberts; one sat behind an iron
locomotive and drove to the city on iron rails, passing over an iron
bridge and arriving at an iron-covered railroad station: in America,
after 1847, the front of the office-building might even be made of
cast iron. In the most typical of Victorian utopias, that of J. S. Buck-
ingham, the ideal city is built almost entirely of iron.

Although the Italians had designed iron bridges in the sixteenth
century, the first to be built in England was in 1779, across the
River Severn: the first iron dome was put on the Halles des Bles in
Paris in 1817; the first iron ship was built in 1787, and the first iron
steamship in 1821. So deep was the faith in iron during the paleo-
technic period that it was not merely a favorite form of medicine,
chosen as much for its magical association with strength as for any
tangible benefits, but it was likewise offered for sale, if not actually
used, for cuffs and collars to be worn by men, while, with the de-
velopment of spring steel, iron even replaced whalebone in the
apparatus used by the women of the period to deform their breasts,
pelvises and hips. If the widest and most advantageous use of iron
was in warfare, there was no part of existence, nevertheless, that was
not touched directly or indirectly by the new material.

The cheaper, more efficient production of iron was indeed a direct
result of the tremendous military demand for it. The first notable
improvement in the production of iron, after the Darby process for
making cast iron and the Huntsman process for making crucible steel
was that made by Henry Cort, an English naval agent: he took out
a patent for his puddling process in 1784 and made a timely con-
tribution not merely to the success of England’s iron industry in
the export trade but to the victory of British arms during the
Napoleonic wars. In 1856 Henry Bessemer, an Englishman, took out
the patent for decarbonizing cast iron in his egg-shaped converter to
make steel: a process slightly antedated by the independent inven-
tion of a Kentucky ironmaster, William Kelly. Thanks to Bessemer

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 165

and the later Siemens-Martin process for making steel, the artillery
arm flourished in warfare as never before: and after this period
the ironclad or the steelclad warship, using long-range guns, became
one of the most effective consumers of the national revenue in exist-
ence — as well as one of the most deadly weapons' of war. Cheap iron
and steel made it feasible to equip larger armies and navies than ever
before: bigger cannon, bigger warships, more complicated equip-
ment; while the new railroad system made it possible to put more
men in the field and to put them in constant communication with
the base of supplies at ever greater distances: war became a depart-
ment of large-scale mass production.

In the very midst of celebrating the triumphs of peace and interna-
tionalism in 1851, the paleotechnic regime was preparing for a series
of more lethal wars in which, as a result of modern methods of pro-
duction and transport entire nations would finally become involved:
the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, most deadly and
vicious of all, the World War. Nourished by war, the armament in-
dustries, whose plants were over-swollen through railroad building
and past wars, sought new markets: in America, they found an outlet
in the steel-framed building; but in the long run they were forced
back on the more reliable industry of war, and they loyally served
their stockholders by inciting competitive fears and rivalries among
the nations: the notorious part recently played by the American steel
manufacturers in wrecking the International Arms Conference of
1927 was only typical of a thousand less publicized moves during the
previous century.

Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire
paloetechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy
of blood and iron. Its brutal contempt for life was equalled only by
the almost priestly ritual it developed in preparation for inflicting
death. Its ^^peace’’ was indeed the peace that passeth understanding:
what was it but latent warfare?

What, then, is the nature of this material that exercised such a
powerful effect upon the affairs of men? The use of meteoric iron
possibly goes back very far in history: there is record of iron de-
rived from the ordinary ores as far back as 1000 B.C., but the rapid

166 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

oxidation of iron may have wiped out traces of a much earlier utiliza-
tion. Iron was associated in Egypt with Set, God of the waste
' and desert, an object of fear; and through iron’s close ties with
the military arts this association remains a not inappropriate one.

Iron’s principal virtue lies in its combination of great strength
and malleability. While varying amounts of carbon change its char-
acteristics, from toughness to brittleness, as steel or wrought iron it
has greater strength than any of the other common metals; and since,
in suitable cross section, an I-beam of iron is as strong as a solid
block, it matches its strength with relative lightness and transport-
ability as compared for example with stone. But not merely is iron
strong under compression, like many varieties of stone; unlike stone,
it is strong in tension and when used in chains and cables, as the
Chinese were the first to use it, its characteristic properties come out
perhaps most clearly. One must pay for these excellent qualities by
working iron under a more intense heat than copper, zinc, or tin:
whereas steel melts at 1800 degrees Centigrade, and cast iron at
1500, copper has a melting point of 1100 and certain types of bronze
only half that heat: so that the casting of bronze long preceded the
casting of iron. On a large scale, iron-making demands power pro-
duction: hence, while wrought iron dates back at least 2500 years,
cast-iron was not invented until the fourteenth century when the
water-driven bellows finally made the high temperature needed in
the blast furnace possible. To handle iron in large masses, conveying
it, rolling it, hammering it, all the accessory machinery must be
brought to an advanced stage of development. Though the ancients
produced hard implements of copper by hammering it cold, the cold
rolling of steel awaited advanced types of power machinery.
Nasmyth’s steam hammer, invented in 1838, was one of the final
steps toward iron working in the grand style which made possible
the titanic machines and utilities of the later half of the nineteenth
century.

But iron has defects almost commensurate with its virtues. In its
usual impure state it is subject to fairly rapid oxidation, and until
the rustless steel alloys were discovered in the neotechnic period it
was necessary to cover iron with at least a film of non-oxidizing mate-

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 167

rial. Left to itself, iron rusts away: without constant lubrication
bearings become jammed and without constant painting the iron ships
and bridges and sheds would in the space of a generation become
dangerously weakened: unless constant care is assured, the stone via-
ducts of the Romans, for example, are superior for long-time use.
Again: iron is subject to changes in temperature: allowances must
be made for expansion and contraction in summer and winter and
during different parts of the same day: and without a protective
covering of a fire-resistant material, the iron loses its strength so
rapidly under heat that the soundest structure would become a mass
of warped and twisted metal. But if iron oxidizes too easily, it
has at least this compensating attribute: next to aluminum it is the
commonest metal on the earth’s crust. Unfortunately, the common-
ness and cheapness of iron, together with the fact that it was used
according to rule-of-thumb prescription long before its properties
were scientifically known, fostered a certain crudeness in its utiliza-
tion: allowing for ignorance by erring on the side of safety, the
designers used over-size members in their iron structures which did
not sufficiently embrace the esthetic advantages — ^to say nothing of
economic gain — possible through lightness and through the closer
adaptation of structure to function. Hence the paradox: between
1775 and 1875 there was technological backwardness in the most
advanced part of technology. If iron was cheap and if power was
plentiful, why should the engineer waste his talents attempting to
use less of either? By any paleotechnic standard, there was no answer
to this question. Much of the iron that the period boasted was dead
weight.

6: The Destruction of Environment

The first mark of paleotechnic industry was the pollution of the air.
Disregarding Benjamin Franklin’s happy suggestion that coal smoke,
being unburnt carbon, should be utilized a second time in the fur-
nace, the new manufacturers erected steam engines and factory chim-
neys without any effort to conserve energy by burning up thoroughly
the products of the first combustion; nor did they at first attempt
to utilize the by-products of the coke-ovens or burn up the gases pro-

168 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

duced in the blast-furnace. For all its boasts of improvement, the
steam engine was only ten per cent efiEcient: ninety per cent of the
heat created escaped in radiation, and a good part of the fuel went
up the flue. Just as the noisy clank of Watt’s original engiae was
maintained, against his own desire to do away with it, as a pleasing
mark of power and eflSciency, so the smoking factory chimney, which
polluted the air and wasted energy, whose pall of smoke increased
the number and thickness of natural fogs and shut off still more sun-
light — ^this emblem of a crude, imperfect technics became the boasted
symbol of prosperity. And here the concentration of paleotechnic
industry added to the evils of the process itself. The pollution and
dirt of a small iron works situated in the open country could he
absorbed or carried away without difficulty. When twenty large iron
works were grouped together, concentrating their effluvia and their
waste-products, a wholesale deterioration of the environment in-
evitably followed.

How serious a loss was occasioned by these paleotechnic habits one
can see even today, and one can put it in terms that even paleotects
can understand: the annual cost of keeping Pittsburgh clean because
of smoke has been estimated at $1,500,000 for extra laundry work,
$750,000 for extra general cleaning, and $360,000 for extra curtain
cleaning: an estimate which does not include losses due to the cor-
rosion of buildings, to extra cost of light during periods of smog, and
the losses occasioned by the lowering of health and vitality through
interference with the sim’s rays. The hydrochloric acid evolved by the
Le Blanc process for manufacturing sodium carbonate was wasted
until an act of the British Parliament in 1863, incited by the cor-
rosive action of the gas on the surrounding vegetation and metal
work, compelled its conservation. Need one add that the chlorine
in the “waste-product” was turned to highly profitable commercial
uses as a bleaching powder?

In this paleotechnic world the realities were money, prices, capital,
shares: the environment itself, like most of human existence, was
treated as an abstraction. Air and sunlight, because of their deplor-
able lack of value in exchange, had no reality at all. Andrew Ure,
the great British apologist for Victorian capitalism, was aghast at

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

169

llie excellent physician who testified before Sadler’s Factory Investi-
gating Commission on the basis of experiments made by Dr. Edwards
in Paris with tadpoles, that sunlight was essential to the growth of
children: a belief which he backed up — a century before the effect
of sunlight in preventing rickets was established — ^by pointing to the
absence of deformities of growth, such as were common in milltowns,
among the Mexicans and Peruvians, regularly exposed to sunlight.
In response to this Ure proudly exhibited the illustration of a factory
room without windows as an example of the excellent gas-lighting
which served as a substitute for the sun!

The values of the paleotechnic economy were topsy-turvy. Its
abstractions were reverenced as “hard facts” and ultimate realities;
whereas the realities of existence were treated by the Gradgrinds and
Bounderbys as abstractions, as sentimental fancies, even as aber-
rations. So this period was marked throughout the Western World
by the widespread perversion and destruction of environment: the
tactics of mining and the debris of the mine spread everywhere. The
current annual wastage through smoke in the United States is huge —
one estimate is as high as approximately $200,000,000. In an all too
literal sense, the paleotechnic economy had money to hum.

In the new chemical industries that sprang up during this period
no serious effort was made to control either air pollution or stream
pollution, nor was any effort made to separate such industries from
the dwelling-quarters of the town. From the soda works, the ammonia
works, the cement-making works, the gas plant, there emerged dust,
fumes, effluvia, sometimes noxious for human organisms. In 1930
the upper Meuse district in Belgium was in a state of panic because
a heavy fog resulted in widespread choking and in the death of 65
people: on careful examination it turned out that there had been
only a particularly heavy concentration of the usual poison gases,
chiefly sulphurous anhydride. Even where the chemical factories
were not conspicuously present, the railroad distributed smut and
dirt: the reek of coal was the very incense of the new industrialism.
A clear sky in an industrial district was the sign of a strike or a lock-
out or an industrial depression.

If atmospheric sewage was the first mark of paleotechnic industry.

170 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Stream pollution was tke second. The dumping of the industrial and
chemical waste-products into the streams was a characteristic mark
of the new order. Wherever the factories went, the streams became
foul and poisonous: the fish died or were forced, like the Hudson
shad, to migrate, and the water became unfit for either drinking or
bathing. In many cases the refuse so wantonly disposed of was in
fact capable of being used: but the whole method of industry was so
short-sighted and so zmscientific that the full utilization of by-products
did not concern anyone for the first century or so. What the streams
could not transport away remained in piles and hillocks on the out-
skirts of the industrial plant, unless it could be used to fill in the
water-courses or the swamps on the new sites of the industrial city.
These forms of industrial pollution of course go back very far in the
history of paleotechnic industry: Agricola makes mention of them,
and they remain to this day one of the most durable attributes of the
mining economy.

But with the new concentration of industry in the industrial city
there was still a third source of stream pollution. This was from
human excrement, recklessly dumped into the rivers and tidal waters
without any preliminary treatment, to say nothing of attempts to
conserve the valuable nitrogenous elements for fertilizer. The
smaller rivers, like the Thames and later the Chicago River became
little less than open sewers. Lacking the first elements of cleanliness,
lacking even a water supply, lacking sanitary regulations of any kind,
lacking the open spaces and gardens of the early medieval city,
which made cruder forms of sewage disposal possible, the new indus-
trial towns became breeding places for disease: t3rphoid bacteria fil-
tered through the soil from privy and open sewer into the wells from
which the poorer classes got their water, or they were pumped out
of the river which served equally as a reservoir for drinking water
and a sewage outlet: sometimes, before the chlorine treatment was
introduced, the municipal waterworks were the chief source of in-
fection. Diseases of dirt and diseases of darkness flourished: small-
pox, typhus, typhoid, rickets, tuberculosis. In the very hospitals, the
prevalent dirt counteracted the mechanical advances of surgery: a
great part of those who survived the surgeon’s scalpel succumbed to

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 171

“hospital fever.” Sir Frederick Treves remembered how the surgeons
of Guy’s Hospital boasted of the incrustations of blood and dirt on
their operating coats, as a mark of long practice! If that was surgical
cleanliness, what could one expect of the impoverished workers in
the new slums?

But there were other types of environmental degradation besides
these forms of pollution. Foremost among these was that resulting
from the regional specialization of industry. Natural regional spe-
cializations exist by reason of strong differences in climate and
geological formation and topography: under natural conditions, no
one attempts to grow coffee in Iceland. But the new specialization
was based, not upon conforming to regional opportunities, but upon
concentrating upon a single aspect of industry and pushing this to
the exclusion of every other form of art and work. Thus England,
the home of the new specialization, turned all its resources and energy
and man-power into mechanical industry and permitted agriculture to
languish: similarly, within the new industrial complex, one locality
specialized in steel and another in cotton, with no attempt at diversifi-
cation of manufacture. The result was a poor and constricted social
life and a precarious industry. By reason of specialization a variety
of regional opportunities were neglected, and the amount of wasteful
cross-haulage in commodities that could be produced with equal
efficiency in any locality was increased; while the shutting down of
the single industry meant the collapse of the entire local community.
Above all, the psychological and social stimulus derived from culti-
vating numerous different occupations and different modes of thought
and living disappeared. Result: an insecure industry, a lop-sided
social life, an impoverishment of inteUectual resources, and often a
physically depleted environment. This intensive regional specializa-
tion at first brought huge pecuniary profits to the masters of industry;
but the price it exacted was too high. Even in terms of mechanical
efficiency the process was a doubtful one, because it was a barrier
against that borrowing from foreign processes which is one of the
principal means of effecting new inventions and creating industries.
While when one considers the environment as an element in human
ecology, the sacrifice of its varied potentialities to mechanical indus-

172 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tries alone was highly inimical to human welfare: the usurpation of
park sites and bathing sites by the new steel works and coke-ovens,
the reckless placement of railroad yards with no respect to any fact ex-
cept cheapness and convenience for the railroad itself, the destruction
of forests, and the building up of solid masses of brick and paving
stone without regard for the special qualities of site and soil — all
these were forms of environmental destruction and waste. The cost of
this indifference to the environment as a human resource — ^who can
measure it? But who can doubt that it offsets a large part of the
otherwise real gains in producing cheap textiles and transporting
surplus foods?

7 : The Degradation of the Worker

Kant’s doctrine, that every human being should be treated as an
end, not as a means, was formulated precisely at the moment when
mechanical industry had begun to treat the worker solely as a means
— a means to cheaper mechanical production. Human beings were
dealt with in the same spirit of brutality as the landscape : labor was
a resource to be exploited, to be mined, to be exhausted, and finally
to be discarded. Responsibility for the worker’s life and health
ended with the cash-payment for the day’s labor.

The poor propagated like flies, reached industrial maturity — ^ten
or twelve years of age — ^promptly, served their term in the new textile
mills or the mines, and died inexpensively. During the early paleo-
technic period their expectation of life was twenty years less than that
of the middle classes. For a number of centuries the degradation of
labor had been going on steadily in Europe; at the end of the
eighteenth century, thanks to the shrewdness and near-sighted rapacity
of the English industrialists, it reached its nadir in England. In other
countries, where the paleotechnic system entered later, the same
brutality emerged: the English merely set the pace. What were the
causes at work?

By the middle of the eighteenth century the handicraft worker had
been reduced, in the new industries, into a competitor with the ma-
chine. But there was one weak spot in the system : the nature of human
beings themselves: for at first they rebelled at the feverish pace, the

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 173

rigid discipline, the dismal monotony of their tasks. The main dif-
ficulty, as Ure pointed out, did not lie so much in the invention of an
efiective self-acting mechanism as in the “distribution of the different
members of the apparatus into one cooperative body, in impelling
each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in
training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work
and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the com-
plex automaton.” “By the infirmity of human nature,” wrote Ure
again, “it happens that the more skillful the workman, the more self-
willed and intractable he is apt to become, and of course the less fit
and component of the mechanical system in which . .he may do
great damage to the whole.”

The first requirement for the factory system, then, was the castra-
tion of skill. The second was the discipline of starvation. The third
was the closing up of alternative occupations by means of land-
monopoly and dis-education.

In actual operation, these three requirements were met in reverse
order. Poverty and land monopoly kept the workers in the locality
that needed them and removed the possibility of their improving their
position by migration: while exclusion from craft apprenticeship,
together with specialization in subdivided and partitioned mechanical
functions, unfitted the machine-worker for the career of pioneer or
farmer, even though he might have the opportunity to move into the
free lands in the newer parts of the world. Reduced to the function
of a cog, the new worker could not operate without being joined to a
machine. Since the workers lacked the capitalists’ incentives of
gain and social opportunity, the only things that kept them bound
to the machine were starvation, ignorance, and fear. These three
conditions were the foundations of industrial discipline, and they
were retained by the directing classes even though the poverty of the
worker undermined and periodically ruined the system of mass pro-
duction which the new factory discipline promoted. Therein lay one
of the inherent “contradictions” of the capitalist scheme of pro-
duction.

It remained for Richard Arkwright, at the beginning of the paleo-
technic development, to put the finishing touches upon the factory

174

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

system itself: perhaps the most remarkable piece of regimentation,
all things considered, that the last thousand years have seen.

Arkwright, indeed, was a sort of archetypal figure of the new
order: while he is often credited, like so many other successful capi-
talists, with being a great inventor, the fact is that he was never guilty
of a single original invention: he appropriated the work of less astute
men. His factories were located in different parts of England, and in
order to supervise them he had to travel with Napoleonic diligence, in
a post-chaise, driven at top speed: he worked far into the night, on
wheels as well as at his desk. Arkwright’s great contribution to his
personal success and to the factory system at large was the elabora-
tion of a code of factory discipline: three hundred years after Prince
Maurice had transformed the military arts, Arkwright perfected the
industrial army. He put an end to the easy, happy-go-lucky habits
that had held over from the past: he forced the one-time independent
handicraftsman to “renounce his old prerogative of stopping when
he pleases, because,” as Ure remarks, “he would thereby throw the
whole establishment into disorder.”

Following upon the earlier improvements of Wyatt and Kay, the
enterpriser in the textile industries had a new weapon of discipline
in his hands. The machines were becoming so automatic that the
worker himself, instead of performing the work, became a machine-
tender, who merely corrected failures in automatic operation, like a
breaking of the threads. This could be done by a woman as easily as
by a man, and by an eight-year-old child as well as by an adult, pro-
vided discipline were harsh enough. As if the competition of children
were not enough to enforce low wages and general submission, there
was still another police-agent: the threat of a new invention which
would eliminate the worker altogether.

From the beginning, technological improvement was the manufac-
turer’s answer to labor insubordination, or, as the invaluable Ure
reminded his readers, new inventions “confirmed the great doctrine
already propounded that when capital enlists science into its service
the refractory hand of labor will be taught docility.” Nasmyth put
this fact in its most benign light when he held, according to Smiles,
that strikes were more productive of good than of evil, since they

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 175

served to stimulate invention. ^‘‘In the case of many of our most potent
self-acting tools and machines, manufacturers could not be induced to
adopt them until compelled to do so by strikes. This was the case of
the self-acting mule, the wool-combing machine, the planing-machine,
the slotting-machine, Nasmyth’s steam-arm, and many others.”

At the opening of the period, in 1770, a writer had projected a
new scheme for providing for paupers. He called it a House of
Terror: it was to be a place where paupers would be confined at work
for fourteen hours a day and kept in hand by a starvation diet. Within
a generation, this House of Terror had become the typical paleotech-
nic factory: in fact the ideal, as Marx well says, paled before the
reality.

Industrial diseases naturally flourished in this environment: the
use of lead glaze in the potteries, phosphorus in the match-making
industry, the failure to use protective masks in the numerous grinding
operations, particularly in the cutlery industry, increased to enor-
mous proportions the fatal forms of industrial poisoning or injury:
mass consumption of china, matches, and cutlery resulted in a steady
destruction of life. As the pace of production increased in certain
trades, the dangers to health and safety in the industrial process it-
self increased: in glass-making, for example, the lungs were over-
taxed, in other industries the increased fatigue resulted in careless
motions and the maceration of a hand or the amputation of a leg
might follow.

With the sudden increase of population that marked the opening
years of the paleotechnic period, labor appeared as a new natural
resource: a lucky find for the labor-prospector and labor-miner.
Small wonder that the ruling classes flushed with moral indignation
when they found that Francis Place and his followers had endeavored
to propagate a knowledge of contraceptives among the Manchester
operatives in the eighteen-twenties: these philanthropic radicals were
threatening an otherwise inexhaustible supply of raw material. And
in so far as the workers were diseased, crippled, stupefied, and re-
duced to apathy and dejection by the paleotechnic environment they
were only, up to a certain point, so much the better adapted to the
new routine of factory and mill. For the highest standards of factory

176 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

efficiency were achieved with the aid of only partly used human or-
ganisms — in short, of defectives.

With the large scale organization of the factory it became neces-
sary that the operatives should at least be able to read notices, and
from 1832 onwards measures for providing education for the child
laborers were introduced in England. But in order to unify the whole
system, the characteristic limitations of the House of Terror were
introduced as far as possible into the school: silence, absence of mo-
tion, complete passivity, response only upon the application of an
outer stimulus, rote learning, verbal parroting, piece-work acquisi-
tion of knowledge — ^these gave the school the happy attributes of jail
and factory combined. Only a rare spirit could escape this discipline,
or battle successfully against this sordid environment. As the habitua-
tion became more complete, the possibility of escaping to other occu-
pations and other environments became more limited.

One final element in the degradation of the worker must be noted:
the maniacal intensity of work. Marx attributed the lengthening of the
working day in the paleotechnic period to the capitalist’s desire to
extract extra surplus value from the laborer: as long as values in use
predominated, he pointed out, there was no incentive to industrial
slavery and overwork: but as soon as labor became a commodity, the
capitalist sought to obtain as large a share of it as possible for him-
self at the smallest expense. But while the desire for gain was perhaps
the impulse uppermost in lengthening the worker’s day — as it hap-
pened, a mistaken method even from the most limited point of view —
one must still explain the sudden intensity of the desire itself. This
was not a result of capitalist production’s unfolding itself according
to an inner dialectic of development: the desire for gain was a causal
factor in that development. What lay behind its sudden impetus and
fierce intensity was the new contempt for any other mode of life or
form of expression except that associated with the machine. The
esoteric natural philosophy of the seventeenth century had finally
become the popular doctrine of the nineteenth. The gospel of work
was the positive side of the incapacity for art, play, amusement, or
pure craftsmanship which attended the shriveling up of the cultural
and religious values of the past. In the pursuit of gain, the ironmas-

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 177

ters and textile masters drove themselves almost as hard as they drove
their workers: they scrimped and stinted and starved themselves at
the beginning, out of avarice and the will-to-power, as the workers
themselves did out of sheer necessity. The lust for power made the
Boimderbys despise a humane life: but they despised it for them-
selves almost as heartily as they despised it for their wage-slaves.
If the laborers were crippled by the doctrine, so were the masters.

For a new type of personality had emerged, a walking abstraction:
the Economic Man. Living men imitated this penny-in-the-slot autom-
aton, this creature of hare rationalism. These new economic men
sacrificed their digestion, the interests of parenthood, their sexual
life, their health, most of the normal pleasures and delights of civil-
ized existence to the untrammeled pursuit of power and money.
Nothing retarded them; nothing diverted them . . . except finally
the realization that they had more money than they could use, and
more power than they could intelligently exercise. Then came belated
repentance: Robert Owen founds a utopian co-operative colony,
Nobel, the explosives manufacturer, a peace foundation, Carnegie
free libraries. Rockefeller medical institutes. Those whose repent-
ance took a more private form became the victims of their mistresses,
their tailors, their art dealers. Outside the industrial system, the
Economic Man was in a state of neurotic maladjustment. These suc-
cessful neurotics looked upon the arts as unmanly forms of escape
from work and business enterprise: but what was their one-sided,
maniacal concentration upon work but a much more disastrous escape
from life itself? In only the most limited sense were the great indus-
trialists better off than the workers they degraded: jailer and prisoner
were both, so to say, inmates of the same House of Terror.

Yet though the actual results of the new industrialism were to in-
crease the burdens of the ordinary worker, the ideology that fostered
it was directed toward his release. The central elements in that
ideology were two principles that had operated like dynamite upon
the solid rock of feudalism and special privilege: the principle of
utility and the principle of democracy. Instead of justifying their
existence by reason of tradition and custom, the institutions of society
were forced to justify themselves by their actual use. It was in the

178 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

name of social improvement that many obsolete arrangements that
had lingered on from the past were swept away, and it was likewise
by reason of their putative utility to mankind at large that the most
humane and enlightened minds of the early nineteenth century wel-
comed machines and sanctioned their introduction. Meanwhile, the
eighteenth century had turned the Christian notion of the equality of
all men in Heaven into an equality of all men on earth: they were
not to achieve it by conversion and death and immortality, but were
supposed to be “born free and equal.” While the bourgeoisie inter-
preted these terms to their own advantage, the notion of democracy
nevertheless served as a psychological rationalization for machine in-
dustry: for the mass production of cheap goods merely carried the
principle of democracy on to the material plane, and the machine
could be justified because it favored the process of vulgarization.
This notion took hold very slowly in Europe; but in America, where
class barriers were not so solid, it worked out into a levelling upward
of the standard of expenditure. Had this levelling meant a genuine
equalization of the standard of life, it would have been a beneficent
one: but in reality it worked out spottily, following the lines most
favorable for profits, and thus often levelling downward, undermining
taste and judgment, lowering quality, multiplying inferior goods.

8: The Starvation of Life

The degradation of the worker was the central point in that more
widespread starvation of life which took place during the paleotechnic
regime, and which still continues in those many areas and occupations
where paleotechnic habits predominate.

In the depauperate homes of the workers in Birmingham and Leeds
and Glasgow, in New York and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, in Ham-
burg and Elberfeld-Barmen and Lille and Lyons, and in similar cen-
ters from Bombay to Moscow, rickety and undernourished children
grew up: dirt and squalor were the constant facts of their environ-
ment. Shut off from the country by miles of paved streets, the most
common sights of field and farm might be strange to them: the sight
of violets, buttercups, day-lilies, the smell of mint, honeysuckle, the
locust trees, the raw earth opened by the plow, the warm hay piled

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

179

up in the sun, or the fishy tang of beach and salt-marsh. Overcast by
the smoke-pall, the sky itself might be shut out and the sunlight
diminished; even the stars at night became dim.

The essential pattern set by paleotechnic industry in England,
with its great technical lead and its sedate, well-disciplined opera-
tives, was repeated in every new region, as the machine girdled the
globe.

Under the stress of competition, adulterants in food became a com-
monplace of Victorian industry: flour was supplemented with plaster,
pepper with wood, rancid bacon was treated with boric acid, milk
was kept from souring with embalming fluid, and thousands of medi-
cal nostrums flourished under the protection of patents, bilge-water
or poison whose sole efficacy resided in the auto-hypnotism produced
by the glowing lies on their labels. Stale and rancid food degraded
the sense of taste and upset the digestion: gin, rum, whisky, strong
tobacco made the palate less sensitive and befuddled the senses: but
drink still remained the ^^quickest way of getting out of Manchester.”
Religion ceased in large groups to be the opiate of the poor: indeed
the mines and the textile mills often lacked even the barest elements
of the older Christian culture: and it would be more nearly true to
say that opiates became the religion of the poor.

Add to the lack of light a lack of color: except for the advertise-
ments on the hoardings, the prevailing tones were dingy ones: in a
murky atmosphere even the shadows lose their rich ultramarine or
violet colors. The rhythm of movement disappeared: within the fac-
tory the quick staccato of the machine displaced the organic rhythms,
measured to song, that characterized the old workshop, as Bucher has
pointed out: while the dejected and the outcast shuffled along the
streets in Cities of Dreadful Night, and the sharp athletic movements
of the sword dances and the morris dances disappeared in the sur-
viving dances of the working classes, who began to imitate clumsily
the graceful boredom of the idle and the leisured.

Sex, above all, was starved and degraded in this environment. In
the mines and factories an indiscriminate sexual intercourse of the
most brutish kind was the only relief from the tedium and drudgery
of the day: in some of the English mines the women pulling the carts

180 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

even worked completely naked — dirty, wild, and degraded as only the
worst slaves of antiquity had been. Among the agricultural popula-
tion in England sexual experience before marriage was a period of
experimental grace before settling down: among the new industrial
workers, it was often preliminary to abortion, as contemporary evi-
dence proves. The organization of the early factories, which threw
girls and boys into the same sleeping quarters, also gave power to
the overseers of the children which they frequently abused: sadisms
and perversions of every kind were common. Home life was crowded
out of existence; the very ability to cook disappeared among the
women workers.

Even among the more prosperous middle classes, sex lost both its
intensity and its priapic sting. A cold rape followed the prudent con-
tinences and avoidances of the pre-marital state of women. The
secrets of sexual stimulation and sexual pleasure were confined to
the specialists in the brothels, and garbled knowledge about the pos-
sibilities of intercourse were conveyed by well-meaning amateurs
or by quacks whose books on sexology acted as an additional bait,
frequently, for their patent medicines. The sight of the naked body,
so necessary for its proud exercise and dilation, was discreetly pro-
hibited even in the form of undraped statues: moralists looked upon
it as a lewd distraction that would take the mind off work and under-
mine the systematic inhibitions of machine industry. Sex had no
industrial value. The ideal paleotechnic figure did not even have legs,
to say nothing of breasts and sexual organs: even the bustle dis-
guised and deformed the rich curve of the buttocks in the act of
making them monstrous.

This starvation of the senses, this restriction and depletion of the
physical body, created a race of invalids: people who knew only par-
tial health, partial physical strength, partial sexual potency: it was
the rural types, far from the paleotechnic environment, the country
squire and the parson and the agricultural laborer, who had in the
life insurance tables the possibility of a long life and a healthy one.
Ironically enough, the dominant figures in the new struggle for exist-
ence lacked biological survival value: biologically the balance of
power was in the countryside, and it was only by faking the statistics

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 181

— ^that is, by failing to correct them for age-groups — ^that the weak-
nesses of the new industrial towns could be concealed.

With the starvation of the senses went a general starvation of the
mind: mere literacy, the ability to read signs, shop notices, news-
papers, took the place of that general sensory and motor training
that went with the handicraft and the agricultural industries. In vain
did the educators of the period, like Schreber in Germany with his
projects for Schrehergarten as necessary elements in an integral edu-
cation, and like Spencer in England with his praise of leisure, idle-
ness, and pleasant sport, attempt to combat this desiccation of the
mind and this drying up of life at the roots. The manual training that
was introduced was as abstract as drill; the art fostered by South
Kensington was more dead and dull than the untutored products of
the machine.

The eye, the ear, the touch, starved and battered by the external
environment, took refuge in the fidtered medium of print; and the
sad constraint of the blind applied to all the avenues of experience.
The museum took the place of concrete reality; the guidebook took
the place of the museum; the criticism took the place of the picture;
the written description took the place of the building, the scene in
nature, the adventure, the living act. This exaggerates and caricatures
the paleotechnic state of mind; but it does not essentially falsify it.
Could it have been otherwise? The new environment did not lend
itself to first hand exploration and reception. To take it at second
hand, to put at least a psychological distance between the observer
and the horrors and deformities observed, was really to make the
best of it. The starvation and diminution of life was universal: a cer-
tain dullness and irresponsiveness, in short, a state of partial anesthe-
sia, became a condition of survival. At the very height of England’s
industrial squalor, when the houses for the working classes were
frequently built beside open sewers and when rows of them were
being built back to back — at that very moment complacent scholars
writing in middle-class libraries could dwell upon the “filth” and
“dirt” and “ignorance” of the Middle Ages, as compared with the
enlightenment and cleanliness of their own.

How was that belief possible? One must pause for a second to

182 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

examine its origin. For one cannot imderstand the technics, unless one
appreciates its debt to the mythology it had conjured up.

9: The Doctrine of Progress

The mechanism that produced the conceit and the self-compla-
cence of the paleotechnic period was in fact beautifully simple.
In the eighteenth century the notion of Progress had been elevated
into a cardinal doctrine of the educated classes. Man, according to
the philosophers and rationalists, was climbing steadily out of the
mire of superstition, ignorance, savagery, into a world that was to
become ever more polished, humane and rational — ^the world of
the Paris salons before the hailstorm of revolution broke the win-
dowpanes and drove the talkers to the cellar. Tools and instruments
and laws and institutions had all been improved: instead of being
moved by instincts and governed by force, men were capable of
being moved and governed by reason. The student at the university
had more mathematical knowledge than Euclid ; and so, too, did the
middle class man, surrounded by his new comforts, have more wealth
than Charlemagne. In the nature of progress, the world would go on
forever and forever in the same direction, becoming more humane,
more comfortable, more peaceful, more smooth to travel in, and
above all, much more rich.

This picture of a steady, persistent, straight-line, and almost uni-
form improvement throughout history had all the parochialism of
the eighteenth century: for despite Rousseau’s passionate conviction
that the advance in the arts and sciences had depraved morals, the
advocates of Progress regarded their own period — ^which was in fact
a low one measured by almost any standard except scientific thought
and raw energy — ^as the natural peak of humanity’s ascent to date.
With the rapid improvement of machines, the vague eighteenth cen-
tury doctrine received new confirmation in the nineteenth century.
The laws of progress became self-evident: were not new machines
being invented every year? Were they not transformed by successive
modifications? Did not chimneys draw better, were not houses
warmer, had not railroads been invented?

Here was a convenient measuring stick for historical comparison.

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 183

Assuming that progress was a reality, if the cities of the nineteenth
century were dirty, the cities of the thirteenth century must have been
six centuries dirtier: for had not the world become constantly cleaner?
If the hospitals of the early nineteenth century were overcrowded
pest-houses, then those of the fifteenth century must have been even
more deadly. If the workers of the new factory towns were ignorant
and superstitious, then the workers who produced Chartres and Bam-
berg must have been more stupid and unenlightened. If the greater
part of the population were still destitute despite the prosperity of the
textile trades and the hardware trades, then the workers of the handi-
craft period must have been more impoverished. The fact that the
cities of the thirteenth century were far brighter and cleaner and
better ordered than the new Victorian towns: the fact that medieval
hospitals were more spacious and more sanitary than their Victorian
successors: the fact that in many parts of Europe the medieval worker
had demonstrably a far higher standard of living than the paleotech-
nic drudge, tied triumphantly to a semi-automatic machine — ^these
facts did not even occur to the exponents of Progress as possibilities
for investigation. They were ruled out automatically by the theory
itself.

Plainly, by taking some low point of human development in the
past, one might over a limited period of time point to a real advance.
But if one began with a high point — for example, the fact that Ger-
man miners in the sixteenth century frequently worked in three
shifts of only eight hours each — ^the facts of progress, when one
surveyed the mines of the nineteenth century, were non-existent. Or
if one began with the constant feudal strife of fourteentli century
Europe, the peace that prevailed over great areas of Western Europe
between 1815 and 1914 was a great gain. But if one compared the
amoimt of destruction caused by a hundred years of the most mur-
derous warfare in the Middle Ages with what took place in four
short years during the World War, precisely because of such great
instruments of technological progress as modem artillery, steel
tanks, poison gas, bombs and flame throwers, picric acid and T.N.T.,
the result was a step backward.

Value, in the doctrine of progress, was reduced to a time-calcula-

184 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tion: value was in fact movement in time. To be old-fashioned or
to be ‘^^out of date” was to lack value. Progress was the equivalent
in history of mechanical motion through space: it was after beholding
a thundering railroad train that Tennyson exclaimed, with exquisite
aptness, ^Tet the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves
of change.” The machine was displacing every other source of value
partly because the machine was by its nature the most progressive
element in the new economy.

What remained valid in the notion of progress were two things
that had no essential connection with human improvement. First: the
fact of life, with its birth, development, renewal, decay, which one
might generalize, in such a fashion as to include the whole universe,
as the fact of change, motion, transformation of energy. Second: the
social fact of accumulation: that is the tendency to augment and
conserve those parts of the social heritage which lend themselves to
transmission tlirough time. No society can escape the fact of change
or evade the duty of selective accumulation. Unfortunately change
and accumulation work in both directions: energies may be dis-
sipated, institutions may decay, and societies may pile up evils and
burdens as well as goods and benefits. To assume that a later point
in development necessarily brings a higher kind of society is merely
to confuse the neutral quality of complexity or maturity with im-
provement. To assume that a later point in time necessarily carries
a greater accumulation of values is to forget the recurrent facts of
barbarism and degradation.

Unlike the organic patterns of movement through space and time,
the cycle of growth and decay, the balanced motion of the dancer,
the statement and return of the musical composition, progress was
motion toward infinity, motion without completion or end, motion
for motion’s sake. One could not have too much progress; it could
not come too rapidly; it could not spread too widely; and it could
not destroy the “unprogressive” elements in society too swiftly and
ruthlessly: for progress was a good in itself independent of direction
or end. In the name of progress, the limited but balanced economy
of the Hindu village, with its local potter, its local spinners and
weavers, its local smith, was overthrown for the sake of providing

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

185

a market for the potteries of the Five Towns and the textiles of Man-
chester and the superfluous hardware of Birmingham. The result
was impoverished villages in India, hideous and destitute towns in
England, and a great wastage in tonnage and man-power in plying
the oceans between: but at all events a victory for progress.

Life was judged by the extent to which it ministered to progress,
progress was not judged by the extent to which it ministered to life.
The last possibility would have been fatal to admit: it would have
transported the problem from the cosmic plane to a human one.
What paleotect dared ask himself whether labor-saving, money-
grubbing, power-acquiring, space-annihilating, thing-producing de-
vices were in fact producing an equivalent expansion and enrichment
of life? That question would have been the ultimate heresy. The
men who asked it, the Ruskins, the Nietzsches, the Melvilles, were in
fact treated as heretics and cast out of this society: in more than
one case, they were condemned to an exacerbating solitude that
reached the limit of madness.

10: The Struggle for Existence

But progress had an economic side: at bottom it was little less
than an elaborate rationalizing of the dominant economic conditions.
For Progress was possible only through increased production: pro-
duction grew in volume only through larger sales : these in turn were
an incentive to mechanical improvements and fresh inventions which
ministered to new desires and made people conscious of new neces-
sities. So the struggle for the market became the dominant motive
in a progressive existence.

The laborer sold himself to the highest bidder in the labor market.
His work was not an exhibition of personal pride and skill but a
commodity, whose value varied with the quantity of other laborers
who were available for performing the same task. For a while the
professions, like law and medicine, still maintained a qualitative
standard: but their traditions were insidiously undermined by the
more general practices of the market. Similarly, the manufacturer
sold his product in the commercial market. Buying cheap and selling
dear, he had no other standard than that of large profits: at the

186 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

height of this economy John Bright defended the adulteration of
goods in the British House of Commons as a necessary incident of
competitive sale.

To widen the margin between the costs of production and the return
from sales in a competitive market, the manufacturer depressed
wages, lengthened hours, speeded up motions, shortened the worker’s
period of rest, deprived him of recreation and education, robbed
him in youth of the opportunities for growth, in maturity of the
benefits of family life, and in old age of his security and peace.
So unscrupulous was the competition that in the early part of the
period, the manufacturers even defrauded their own class: the mines
that used Watt’s steam engine refused to pay him the royalties they
owed, and Shuttle Clubs were formed by the manufacturers to assist
members sued by Kay for royalties on his invention.

This struggle for the market was finally given a philosophic name:
it was called the struggle for existence. Wage worker competed
against wage worker for hare subsistence; the unskilled competed
against the skilled; women and children competed against the male
heads of families. Along with this horizontal struggle between the
different elements in the working class, there was a vertical struggle
that rent society in two: the class struggle, the struggle between the
possessors and the dispossessed. These universal struggles served as
basis for the new mythology which complemented and extended the
more optimistic theory of progress.

In his essay on population the Reverend T. R. Malthus shrewdly
generalized the actual state of England in the midst of the disorders
that attended the new industry. He stated that population tended to
expand more rapidly than the food supply, and that it avoided star-
vation only through a limitation by means of the positive check of
continence, or the negative checks of misery, disease, and war. In
the course of the struggle for food, the upper classes, with their
thrift and foresight and superior mentality emerged from the ruck
of mankind. With this image in mind, and with Malthus’s Essay on
Population as the definite stimulus to their thoughts, two British
biologists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, projected the in-
tense struggle for the market upon the world of life in general.

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 187

Another philosopher of industrialism, just as characteristically a
railroad engineer by profession as Spinoza had been a lens grinder,
coined a phrase that touched off the whole process: to the struggle
for existence and the process of natural selection Spencer appended
the results: “the survival of the fittest.” The phrase itself was a
tautology; for survival was taken as the proof of fitness: but that
did not decrease its usefulness.

This new ideology arose out of the new social order, not out of
Darwin’s able biological work. His scientific study of modifications,
variations, and the processes of sexual selection were neither fur-
thered nor explained by a theory which accounted not for the occur-
rence of new organic adaptations, but merely for a possible mechan-
ism whereby certain forms had been weeded out after the survivors
had been favorably modified. Moreover, there were the demonstrable
facts of commensalism and symbiosis, to say nothing of ecological
partnership, of which Darwin himself was fully conscious, to modify
the Victorian nightmare of a nature red in tooth and claw.

The point is, however, that in paleotechnic society the weaker were
indeed driven to the wall and mutual aid had almost disappeared.
The Malthus-Darwin doctrine explained the dominance of the new
bourgeoisie, people without taste, imagination, intellect, moral
scruples, general culture or even elementary bowels of compassion,
who rose to the surface precisely because they fitted an environment
that had no place and no use for any of these humane attributes.
Only anti-social qualities had survival value. Only people who valued
machines more than men were capable under these conditions of
governing men to their own profit and advantage.

11: Class and Nation

The struggle between the possessing classes and the working classes
during this period assumed a new form, because the system of pro-
duction and exchange and the common intellectual milieu had all
profoundly altered. This struggle was closely observed and for the
first time accurately appraised by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
Just as Darwin had extended the competition of the market to the

188 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

entire world of life, so did Engels and Marx extend the contemporary

class struggle to the entire history of society.

But there was a significant difference between the new class strug-
gles and the slave uprisings, the peasant rebellions, the local conflicts
between masters and journeymen that had occurred previously in
Europe. The new struggle was continuous, the old had been sporadic.
Except for the medieval utopian movements — such as the Lollards —
the earlier conflicts had been, in the main, struggles over abuses in a
system which both master and worker accepted: the appeal of the
worker was to an antecedent right or privilege that had been grossly
violated. The new struggle was over the system itself: it was an
attempt on the workers’ part to modify the system of free wage com-
petition and free contract that left the worker, a helpless atom, free
to starve or cut his own throat if he did not accept the conditions the
industrialists offered.

From the standpoint of the paleotechnic worker, the goal of the
struggle was control of the labor market: he sought for power as a
bargainer, obtaining a slightly larger share of the costs of produc-
tion, or, if you will, the profits of sale. But he did not, in general,
seek responsible participation as a worker in the business of pro-
duction: he was not ready to be an autonomous partner in the new
collective mechanism, in which the least cog was as important to the
process as a whole as the engineers and scientists who had devised
it and who controlled it. Here one marks the great gap between
handicraft and the early machine economy. Under the first system
the worker was on his way to being a journeyman; the journeyman,
broadened by travel to other centers, and inducted into the mysteries
of his craft, was capable, not merely of bargaining with his employer,
but of taking his place. The class conflict was lessened by the fact
that the masters could not take away the workers’ tools of production,
which were personal, nor could they decrease his actual pleasure
of craftsmanship. Not until specialization and expropriation had
given the employer a special advantage did the conflict begin to take
on its paleotechnic form. Under the capitalist system the worker could
achieve security and mastery only by leaving his class. The con-
sumer’s cooperative movement was a partial exception to this on

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 189

the side of consumption: far more important ultimately than the
spectacular wage-battles that were fought during this period; but it
did not touch the organization of the factory itself.

Unfortunately, on the terms of the class struggle, there was no
means of preparing the worker for the final results of his conquest.
The struggle was in itself an education for warfare, not for industrial
management and production. The battle was constant and bitter, and
it was conducted without mercy on the part of the exploiting classes,
who used the utmost brutality that the police and the soldiery were
capable of, on occasion, to break the resistance of the workers. In
the course of this war one or another part of the proletariat — chiefly
the more skilled occupations — made definite gains in wages and
hours, and they shook off the more degrading forms of wage-slavery
and sweating: but the fundamental condition remained unaltered.
Meanwhile, the machine process itself, with its matter-of-fact pro-
cedure, its automatism, its impersonality, its reliance upon the spe-
cialized services and intricate technological studies of the engineer,
was getting further and further beyond the worker’s unaided power
of intellectual apprehension or political control.

Marx’s original prediction tliat the class struggle would be fought
out on strict class lines between an impoverished international pro-
letariat and an equally coherent international bourgeoisie was falsi-
fied by two unexpected conditions. One was the growth of the middle
classes and the small industries: instead of being automatically
wiped out they showed unexpected resistance and staying power. In
a crisis, the big industries with their vast over-capitalization and their
enormous overhead, were less capable of adjusting themselves to the
situation than the smaller ones. In order to make the market more
secure, there were even fitful attempts to raise the standard of con-
sumption among the workers themselves: so the sharp lines neces-
sary for successful warfare only emerged in periods of depression.
The second fact was the new alignment of forces between country
and coxmtry, which tended to undermine the internationalism of cap-
ital and disrupt the unity of the proletariat. When Marx wrote in the
eighteen fifties Nationalism seemed to him, as it seemed to Cobden,

m TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

to be a dying movement: events showed that, on the contrary, it had

taken a new lease on life. i

With the massing of the population into national states which con-
tinued during the nineteenth century, the national struggle cut at
right angles to the class struggle. After the French revolution war,
which was once the sport of dynasties, became the major industrial
occupation of whole peoples: “democratic” conscription made this
possible.

The struggle for political power, always limited in the past by
financial weakness, technical restrictions, the indifference and hos-
tility of the underlying population, now became a struggle between
states for the command of exploitable areas: the mines of Lorraine,
the diamond fields of South Africa, the South American markets,
possible sources of supply or possible outlets for products that could
not be absorbed by the depressed proletariat of the industrial coun-
tries, or, finally, possible fields for investment for the surplus of
capital heaped up in the “progressive” countries.

“The present,” exclaimed Ure in 1835, “is distinguished from
every preceding age by an universal ardor of enterprise in arts and
manufactures. Nationals, convinced at length that war is always a
losing game, have converted their swords and muskets into factory
implements, and now contend with each other in the bloodless but still
formidable strife of trade. They no longer send troops to fight on
distant fields, but fabrics to drive before them those of their old
adversaries in arms, to take possession of a foreign market. To
impair the resources of a rival at home, by underselling his wares
abroad, is the new belligerent system, in pursuance of which every
nerve and sinew of the people are put upon the strain.” Unfortunately
the sublimation was not complete: economic rivalries added fuel to
national hates and gave a pseudo-rational face to the most violently
irrational motives.

Even the leading utopias of the paleotechnic phase were national-
ist and militarist: Cabet’s Icaria, which was contemporary with the
liberal revolutions of 1848, was a masterpiece of warlike regimen-
tation in every detail of life, whilst Bellamy, in 1888, took the
organization of the army, on a basis of compulsory service, as the

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 191

pattern for all industrial activities. The intensity of these nationalist
struggles, aided by the more tribal instincts, somewhat weakened the
effect of the class struggles. But they were alike in this respect;
neither the state as conceived by the followers of Austin, nor the
proletarian class as conceived by the followers of Marx, were organic
entities or true social groups: they were both arbitrary collections of
individuals, held together not by common functions, but by a common
collective symbol of loyalty and hate. This collective symbol had a
magical oflSce: it was willed into existence by magical formulae and
incantations, and kept alive by a collective ritual. So long as the
ritual was piously maintained the subjective nature of its premises
could be ignored. But the “nation” had this advantage over the
“class” : it could conjure up more primitive responses, for it played,
not on material advantage, but on naive hates and manias and death-
wishes. After 1850 nationalism became the drill master of the rest-
less proletariat, and the latter worked out its sense of inferiority
and defeat by identification with the all-powerful State.

12; The Empire of Muddle

The quantity of goods produced by the machine was supposed to
be automatically regulated by the law of supply and demand: com-
modities, like water, were supposed to seek their own level: in the
long run, only so much goods would be produced as could be sold at
a profit. The lessening of profits automatically, according to this
theory, closed the valve of production; while the increase of profits
automatically opened it and even would lead to the construction of
new feeders. Producing the necessaries of life, was, however, merely
a by-product of making profits. Since there was more money to be
made in textiles for foreign markets than in sound workers’ houses
for domestic use, more profit in beer and gin than in unadulterated
bread, the elementary necessities of shelter — and sometimes even
food — ^were scandalously neglected. Ure, the lyric poet of the textile
industries, readily confessed that “to the production of food and
domestic accommodation not many automatic inventions have been
applied, or seem to be extensively applicable.” As prophecy this

192 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

proved absurd; but as a description of the current limitations, it was

correct.

The shortage of housing for the workers, the congestion of domestic
quarters, the erection of vile insanitary barracks to serve as substi-
tutes for decent human shelter — ^these were universal characteristics
of the paleotechnic regime. Fortunately, the terrible incidence of
disease in the poorer quarters of the cities awakened the attention of
health officers, and in the name of sanitation and public health
various measures were taken, dating in England to Shaftesbury’s
“model” housing acts in 1851, to alleviate the worst conditions by
restrictive legislation, compulsory slum repair, and even an insig-
nificant modicum of slum clearance and improved housing. Some of
the best examples, from the eighteenth century on, appeared in the
colliery villages of England, possibly as a result of their semi-feudal
traditions, to be followed in the 1860’s by Krupp’s workers’ housing
at Essen. Slowly, a small number of the worst evils were wiped away,
despite the fact that the new laws were in opposition to the holy
principles of free competitive enterprise in the production of illth.

The jockeying for profits without any regard for the stable order-
ing of production had two unfortunate results. For one thing, it
undermined agriculture. As long as food supplies and materials
could be obtained cheaply from some far part of the earth, even
at the expense of the speedy exhaustion of the soils that were being
recklessly cropped for cotton and wheat, no effort was made to keep
agriculture and industry in equipoise. The coxmtryside, reduced in
general to the margin of subsistence, was further depressed by the
drift of population into the apparently thriving factory towns, with
infant mortality rates that often rose as high as 300 or more per
thousand live births. The application of machines to sowing, reaping,
threshing, instituted on a large scale with the multitude of new
reapers invented at the beginning of the century — ^McCormick’s was
merely one of many — only hastened the pace of this development.

The second effect was even more disastrous. It divided the world
into areas of machine production and areas of foods and raw mate-
rials: this made the existence of the over-industrialized countries
more precarious, the further they were cut off from their rural base

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

193

of supplies: hence the beginning of strenuous naval competition. Not
merely did the existence of the coal-agglomerations themselves de-
pend upon their ability to command water from distant streams and
lakes, and food from distant fields and farms: hut continued produc-
tion depended upon the ability to bribe or browbeat other parts of
the earth into accepting their industrial products. The Civil War
in America, by cutting off the supply of cotton, reduced to a state of
extreme penury the brave and honest textile workers of Lancashire.
And the fear of repeating such events, in other industries beside
cotton, was responsible in good part for the panicky imperialism and
armament competition that developed throughout the world after
1870. As paleotechnic industry was founded originally upon system-
atic child slavery, so it was dependent for its continued growth upon
a forced outlet for its goods.

Unfortunately for the countries that relied upon this process to
go on indefinitely, the original consuming areas — ^the new or the
“backward” countries — speedily took possession of the common
heritage in science and technics and began to produce machined
goods for themselves. That tendency became universal by the eighties.
It was temporarily limited by the fact that England, which long
retained its technical superiority in weaving and spinning, could use
7 operatives per thousand spindles in 1837 and only 3 operatives
per thousand in 1887, while Germany, its nearest competitor at
the second date still used from 7^ to 9, while Bombay required
25. But in the long run neither England nor the “advanced countries”
could hold the lead: for the new machine system was a universal one.
Therewith one of the main props of paleotechnic industry was dis-
placed. ,

The hit-or-miss tactics of the market place pervaded the entire
social structure. The leaders of industry were for the most part
empirics: boasting that they were “practical” men they prided them-
selves on their technical ignorance and naivety. Solvay, who made a
fortune out of the Solvay soda process, knew nothing about chem-
istry; neither did Krupp, the discoverer of cast-steel; Hancock, one
of the early experimenters with India rubber was equally ignorant.
Bessemer, the inventor of many things besides the Bessemer process

194 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of making steel, at first merely stumbled on his great invention
through the accident of using iron with a low phosphorus content:
it was only the failure of his method with the continental ores that
had a high phosphorus content that led him to consider the chemistry
of the process.

Within the industrial plant scientific knowledge was at a discount.
The practical man, contemptuous of theory, scornful of exact train-
ing, ignorant of science, was uppermost. Trade secrets, sometimes
important, sometimes merely childish empiricism, retarded the co-
operative extension of knowledge which has been the basis of all our
major technical advances; whilst the system of patent monopolies
was used hy astute business men to drive improvements out of the
market, if they threatened to upset existing financial values, or to
delay their introduction — as the automatic telephone was delayed —
imtil the original rights to the patent had expired. Right down to the
World War an unwillingness to avail itself of scientific knowledge
or to promote scientific research characterized paleotechnic industry
throughout the world. Perhaps the only large exception to this, the
German dye industry, was due to its close connection with the poisons
and explosives necessary for military purposes.

While free competition prevailed between individual manufac-
turers, planned production for industry as a whole was impossible:
each manufacturer remained his own judge, on the basis of limited
knowledge and information, of the amount of goods he could profit-
ably produce and dispose of. The labor market itself was based on
absence of plan: it was, in fact, by means of a constant surplus of
unemployed workers, who were never systematically integrated into
industry, that wages could be kept low. This excess of the unem-
ployed in “normal and prosperous” times was essential to com-
petitive production. The location of industries was unplanned: acci-
dent, pecuniary advantage, habit, gravitation toward the surplus labor
market, were as important as the tangible advantages from a tech-
nical standpoint. The machine — the outcome of man’s impulse to
conquer his environment and to canalize his random impulses into
orderly activities— produced during the paleotechnic phase the sys-
tematic negation of all its characteristics: nothing less than the

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

195

empire of muddle. What was, indeed, the boasted “mobility of la-
bor” but the breakdown of stable social relations and the disorgani-
zation of family life?

The state of paleotechnic society may be described, ideally, as one
of wardom. Its typical organs, from mine to factory, from blast-
furnace to slum, from slum to battlefield, were at the service of
death. Competition: struggle for existence: domination and submis-
sion: extinction. With war at once the main stimulus, the under-
lying basis, and the direct destination of this society, the normal
motives and reactions of human beings were narrowed down to the
desire for domination and to the fear of annihilation — ^the fear of
poverty, the fear of unemployment, the fear of losing class status,
the fear of starvation, the fear of mutilation and death. When war
finally came, it was welcomed with open arms, for it relieved the
intolerable suspense: the shock of reality, however grim, was more
bearable than the constant menace of spectres, worked up and pa-
raded forth by the journalist and the politician. The mine and the
battlefield underlay all the paleotechnic activities ; and the practices
they stimulated led to the widespread exploitation of fear.

The rich feared the poor and the poor feared the rent collector:
the middle classes feared the plagues that came from the vile insani-
tary quarters of the industrial city and the poor feared, with justice,
the dirty hospitals to which they were taken. Toward the latter
part of the period religion adopted the uniform of war: singing
Onward Christian Soldiers, the converted marched with defiant humil-
ity in military dress and order: imperialist salvation. The school
was regimented like an army, and the army camp became the uni-
versal school: teacher and pupil feared each other, even as did
capitalist and worker. Walls, barred windows, barbed wire fences
surrounded the factory as well as the jail. Women feared to bear
children and men feared to beget them: the fear of syphilis and
gonorrhea tainted sexual intercourse: behind the diseases themselves
lurked Ghosts: the spectre of locomotor ataxia, paresis, insanity,
blind children, crippled legs, and the only known remedy for syphilis,
till salvarsan, was itself a poison. The drab prisonlike houses, the
palisades of dull streets, the treeless backyards filled with rubbish,

196 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the unbroken rooftops, with never a gap for park or playground,
underlined this environment of death. A mine explosion, a railway
wreck, a tenement house fire, a military assault upon a group of
strikers, or finally the more potent outbreak of war — ^these were
but appropriate punctuation marks. Exploited for power and profit,
the destination of most of the goods made by the machine was either
the rubbish heap or the battlefield. If the landlords and other monop-
olists enjoyed an unearned increment from the massing of population
and the collective efficiency of the machine, the net result for society
at large might be characterized as the unearned excrement.

13: Power and Time

During the paleotechnic period the changes that were manifested
in every department of technics rested for the most part on one
central fact: the increase of energy. Size, speed, quantity, the multi-
plication of machines, were all reflections of the new means of utiliz-
ing fuel and the enlargement of the available stock of fuel itself.
Power was at last dissociated from its natural human and geographic
limitations: from the caprices of the weather, from the irregularities
of the rainfall and wind, from the energy intake in the form of food
which definitely restricts the output of men and animals.

Power, however, cannot be dissociated from another factor in work,
namely time. The chief use of power during the paleotechnic period
was to decrease the time during which any given quantity of work
can be performed. That much of the time so saved was frittered away
in disordered production, in stoppages derived from the weaknesses
of the social institutions that accompanied the factory, and in unem-
ployment is a fact which diminished the putative efficiency of the
new regime. Vast were the labors performed by the steam engine
and its accessories; hut vast, likewise, were the losses that accom-
panied them. Measured by effective work, that is, by human effort
transformed into direct subsistence or into durable works of art and
technics, the relative gains of the new industry were pitifully small.
Other civilizations with a smaller output of power and a larger ex-
penditure of time had equalled and possibly surpassed the paleo-
technic period in real efficiency.

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 197

With the enormous increase in power a new tempo had entered
production: the regimentation of time, which had been sporadic and
fitful now began to influence the entire Western World. The symptom
of this change was the mass production of cheap watches: first begun
in Switzerland, and then undertaken on a large scale in Waterbury,
Connecticut, in the eighteen-fifties.

Time-saving now became an important part of labor-saving. And
as time was accumulated and put by, it was reinvested, like money
capital, in new forms of exploitation. From now on filling time
and killing time became important considerations: the early paleo-
technic employers even stole time from their workers by blowing
the factory whistle a quarter of an hour earlier in the morning, or
by moving the hands of the clock around more swiftly during the
lunch period: where the occupation permitted, the worker often re-
ciprocated when the employer’s back was turned. Time, in short, was
a commodity in the sense that money had become a commodity.
Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie,
time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as a heinous
waste. The paleotechnic world did not heed Wordsworth’s Expostula-
tion and Reply: it had no mind to sit upon an old gray stone and
dream its time away.

Just as, on one hand, the filling up of time-compartments became
a duty, so the necessity of “cutting things short” made itself manifest,
too. Poe attributed the vogue of the short-story in the forties to the
need for brief snatches of relaxation in the routine of a busy day.
The immense growth of periodical literature during this period, fol-
lowing the cheap, large-scale production of the steam-driven printing
press (1814) was likewise a mark of the increasing mechanical
division of time. While the three-volume novel served the sober
domestic habits of the Victorian middle classes, the periodical —
quarterly, monthly, daily, and finally almost hourly — served the bulk
of the popular needs. Human pregnancies still lasted nine months;
but the tempo of almost everything else in life was speeded, the span
was contracted, and the limits were arbitrarily clipped, not in terms
of the function and activity, but in terms of a mechanical system
of time accountancy. Mechanical periodicity took the place of organic

198 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

and functional periodicity in every department of life where the

usurpation was possible.

The spread of rapid transportation occasioned a change in the
method of time-keeping itself. Sun time, which varies a minute every
eight miles as one travels from east to west, could no longer be
observed. Instead of a local time based upon the sun, it was necessary
to have a conventional time belt, and to change abruptly by a whole
hour when one entered the next time belt. Standard time was im-
posed by the transcontinental railroads themselves in 1875 in the
United States, ten years before the regulations for standard time
were oflScially promulgated at a World Congress. This carried to a
conclusion that standardization of time that had begun with the
foundation of the Greenwich observatory two hundreo years before,
and had been carried further, first on the sea, by comparing ship’s
chronometers with Greenwich time. The entire planet was now divided
off into a series of time-belts. This orchestrated actions over wider
areas than had ever been able to move simultaneously before.

Mechanical time now became second nature: the acceleration of
the tempo became a new imperative for industry and “progress.” To
reduce the time on a given job, whether the work was a source of
pleasure, or pain, or to quicken movement through space, whether
the traveler journeyed for enjoyment or profit, was looked upon as
a sufficient end in itself. Some of the specific fears as to the results
of this acceleration were absurd, as in the nodon that flight through
space at twenty miles an hour on the railroad would cause heart
disease and undermine the human frame; but in its more general
application, this alteration of the tempo from the organic period,
which cannot be greatly quickened without maladjustment of func-
tion, to the mechanical period, which can be stretched out or intensi-
fied, was indeed made too lightly and thoughtlessly.

Apart from the primitive physical delight in motion for its own
sake, this acceleration of the tempo could not be justified except in
terms of pecuniary rewards. For power and time, the two components
of mechanical work, are in human terms only a function of purpose.
They have no more significance, apart from human purpose, than
- has the sunlight that falls in the solitude of the Sahara desert. During

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 199

the paleotechnic period, the increase of power and the acceleration
of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified them-
selves apart from their human consequences.

Technologically, the department in which paleotechnic industry
rose to its greatest eminence was not the cotton mill but the railroad
system. The success of this new invention is all the more remarkable
because so little of the earlier technique of the stage-coach could be
carried over into the new means of transportation. The railroad was
the first industry to benefit by the use of electricity; for the telegraph
made possible a long distance signalling system and remote control;
and it was in the railroad that the routing through of production and
the timing and inter-relationship of the various parts of production
took place more than a generation before similar tables and schedules
and forecasts made their way into industry as a whole. The invention
of the necessary devices to ensure regularity and safety, from the
air-brake 'and the vestibule car to the automatic switch and automatic
signal system, and the perfection of the system for routing goods
and traffic at varying rates of speed and under varying weather condi-
tions from point to point, was one of the superb technical and
administrative achievements of the nineteenth century. That there
were various curbs on the efficiency of the system as a whole goes
without saying: financial piracy, lack of rational planning of indus-
tries and cities, failure to achieve unified operation of continental
trunk lines. But within the social limitations of the period, the
railroad was both the most characteristic and the most efficient form
of technics.

14: The Esthetic Compensation

But paleotechnic industry was not without an ideal aspect. The very
bleakness of the new environment provoked esthetic compensations.
The eye, deprived of sunlight and color, discovered a new world in
twilight, fog, smoke, tonal distinctions. The haze of the factory town
exercised its own visual magic: the ugly bodies of human beings, the
sordid factories and rubbish heaps, disappeared in the fog, and
instead of the harsh realities one encountered under the sun, there
was a veil of tender lavenders, grays, pearly yellows, wistful blues.

200

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

It was an English painter, J. W. M. Turner, working in the very
heyday of the paleotechnic regime, who left the fashionable classic
landscape with its neat parklike scenery and its artful ruins to create
pictures, during the later part of his career, that had only two
subjects: Fog and Light. Turner was perhaps the first painter to
absorb and directly express the characteristic effects of the new
industrialism: his painting of the steam-locomotive, emerging through
the rain, was perhaps the first lyric inspired by the steam engine.

The smoking factory chimney had helped to create this dense
atmosphere; and by means of the atmosphere one escaped, in vision,
some of the worst effects of the factory chimney. In painting even
the acrid smells disappeared, and only the illusion of loveliness
remained. At a distance, through the mist, the Doulton pottery works
in Lambeth, with their piously misprized decoration, are almost as
stimulating as any of the pictures in the Tate Gallery. Whistler,
from his studio on the Chelsea Embankment, overlooking the factory
district of Battersea, expressed himself through this fog and mist
without the help of light: the finest gradations of tone disclosed and
defined the barges, the outline of a bridge, the distant shore: in the
fog, a row of street lamps shone like tiny moons on a summer night.

But Turner, not merely reacting to the fog, but reacting against it,
turned from the garbage-strewn streets of Covent Market, from the
blackened factories and the darkened London slums, to the purity
of light itself. In a series of pictures he painted a hymn to the wonder
of light, such a hymn as a blind man might sing on finding his eye-
sight, a paean to light emerging from night and fog and smoke and
conquering the world. It was the very lack of sun, the lack of color,
the starvation within the industrial towns for the sight of rural scenes,
that sharpened the art of landscape painting during this period, and
gave birth to its chief collective triumph, the work of the Barbizon
school and the later impressionists, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and most
characteristic if not most original of all, Vincent Van Gogh.

Van Gogh knew the paleotechnic city in its most complete gloom,
the foul, bedraggled, gas-lighted London of the seventies: he also
knew the very source of its dark energies, places like the mines at
La Borinage where he had lived with the miners. In his early pictures

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE

201

he absorbed and courageously faced the most sinister parts of his
environment: he painted the gnarled bodies of the miners, the almost
animal stupor of their faces, bent over the bare dinner of potatoes,
the eternal blacks, grays, dark blues, and soiled yellows of their
poverty-stricken homes. Van Gogh identified himself with this sombre,
forbidding routine: then, going to France, which had never entirely
succumbed to the steam engine and large-scale production, which
still retained its agricultural villages and its petty handicrafts, he
found himself quickened to revolt against the deformities and depri-
vations of the new industrialism. In the clear air of Provence, Van
Gogh beheld the visual world with a sense of intoxication deepened
by the bleak denial he had known so long: the senses, no longer
blanketed and mufiled by smoke and dirt, responded in shrill ecstasy.
The fog lifted: the blind saw: color returned.

Though the chromatic analysis of the impressionists was derived
directly from ChevreuFs scientific researches on color, their vision
was unbelievable to their contemporaries: they were denounced as
impostors because the colors they painted were not dulled by studio
walls, subdued by fog, mellowed by age, smoke, varnish: because
the green of their grass was yellow in the intensity of sunlight, the
snow pink, and the shadows on the white walls lavender. Because the
natural world was not sober, the paleotects thought the artists were
drunk.

While color and light absorbed the new painters, music became
|)oth more narrow and more intense in reaction against the new
environment. The workshop song, the street cries of the tinker, the
dustman, the pedlar, the flower vendor, the chanties of the sailor
hauling the ropes, the traditional songs of the field, the wine-press,
the taproom, were slowly dying out during this period: at the same
time, the power to create new ones was disappearing. Labor was
orchestrated by the number of revolutions per minute, rather than
by the rhythm of song or chant or tattoo. The ballad, with its old
^ religious, military, or tragic contents, was thinned out into the senti-
mental popular song, watered even in its eroticism: its pathos became
bathos: only as literature for the cultivated classes, in the poems of
Coleridge and Wordsworth and Morris, did the ballad survive. It is

202 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

scarcely possible to mention in the same breath “Mary Hamilton’s
to the Kirk Gane” and, let us say. The Baggage Car Ahead. Song
and poesy ceased to be folk possessions: they became “literary,” pro-
fessionalized, segregated. No one thought any longer of asking the
servants to come into the living room to take part in madrigal or
ballad. What happened to poetry had happened likewise to pure
music. But music, in the creation of the new orchestra, and in the
scope and power and movement of the new symphonies, became in
a singularly representative way the ideal coxmterpart of industtial
society.

The baroque orchestra had been built up on the sonority and
volume of stringed instruments. Meanwhile mechanical invention had
added enormously to the range of sound and the qualities of tone
that could be produced: it even made the ear alive to new sounds
and new rhythms. The thin little clavichord became the massive
machine known as the piano, with its great soimding board, and its
extended keyboard: similarly, a series of instruments was introduced
by Adolph Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, around 1840, between
the wood-winds and the old brasses. All the instruments were now
scientifically calibrated: the production of sound became, within
limits, standardized and predictable. And with the increase in the
number of instruments, the division of labor within the orchestra cor-
responded to that of the factory: the division of the process itself
became noticeable in the newer symphonies. The leader was the
superintendent and production manager, in charge of the manufac-
ture and assembly of the product, namely the piece of music, while
the composer corresponded to the inventor, engineer, and designer,
who had to calculate on paper, with the aid of such minor instruments
as the piano, the nature of the ultimate product — ^working out its last
detail before a single step was made in the factory. For difficult
compositions, new instruments were sometimes invented or old ones
resurrected; but in the orchestra the collective efficiency, the collec-
tive harmony, the functional division of labor, the loyal cooperative
interplay between the leaders and the led, produced a collective
unison greater than that which was achieved, in all probability,
within any single factory. For one thing, the rhythm was more subtle;

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 203

and the timing of the successive operations was perfected in the
symphony orchestra long before anything like the same efl&cient
routine came about in the factory.

Here, then, in the constitution of the orchestra, was the ideal pat-
tern of the new society. It was achieved in art before it was ap-
proached in technics. As for the products made possible by the
orchestra, the sjnnphonies of Beethoven and Brahms or the re-orches-
trated music of Bach, they have the distinction of being the most
petfect works of art produced during the paleotechnic period: no
poem, no painting, expresses such depth and energy of spirit, gath-
ering resources from the very elements of life that were stifling and
deforming the existing society, as completely as the new symphonies.
The visual world of the Renascence had been almost obliterated: in
France alone, which had not altogether succumbed either to decay
or to progress, did this world remain alive in the succession of
painters between Delacroix and Renoir. But what was lost in the
other arts, what had disappeared almost completely in architecture,
was recovered in music. Tempo, rhythm, tone, harmony, melody,
polyphony, counterpoint, even dissonance and atonality, were all
utilized freely to create a new ideal world, where the tragic destiny,
the dim longings, the heroic destinies of men could be entertained
once more. Cramped by its new pragmatic routines, driven from the
marketplace and the factory, the human spirit rose to a new suprem-
acy in the concert hall. Its greatest structures were built of sound
and vanished in the act of being produced. If only a small part of
the population listened to these works of art or had any insight into
their meaning, they nevertheless had at least a glimpse of another
heaven than Coketown’s. The music gave more solid nourishment
and warmth than Coketown’s spoiled and adulterated foods, its
shoddy clothes, its jerrybuilt houses.

Apart from painting and music, one looks almost in vain among
the cottons of Manchester, the ceramics of Burslem and Limoges,
or the hardware of Solingen and Shefiield, for objects fine enough to
be placed on even the most obscure shelves of a museum. Although
the best English sculptor of the period, Alfred Stevens, was commis-
sioned to make designs for Sheflleld cutlery, his work was an excep-

204 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tion. Disgusted witli the ugliness of its own products, the paleotechnic
period turned to past ages for models of authenticated art. This
movement began with the realization that the art produced by the
machines for the great exposition of 1851 was beneath contempt.
Under the patronage of Prince Albert, the school and museum at
South Kensington were founded, in order to improve taste and design:
the result was merely to eviscerate what vitality its ugliness possessed.
Similar efforts in the German speaking countries, under the leader-
ship of Gottfried Semper, and in France and Italy and the United
States, produced no better results. For the moment handicraft, as
re-introduced by De Morgan, La Farge, and WiUiam Morris, pro-
vided the only live alternative to dead machine designs. The arts
were degraded to the level of Victorian ladies’ fancy work: a trivi-
ality, a waste of time.

Naturally, human life as a whole did not stop short during this
period. Many people still lived, if with difficulty, for other ends than
profit, power, and comfort: certainly these ends were not within
reach of the millions of men and women who composed the working
classes. Perhaps most of the poets and novelists and painters were
distressed by the new order and defied it in a hundred ways: above
all, by existing as poets and novelists and painters, useless creatures,
whose confrontation of life in its many-sided imity was looked upon
by the Gradgrinds as a wanton escape from the “realities” of their
abstract accountancy. Thackeray deliberately cast his works in a pre-
industrial environment, in order to evade the new issues. Carlyle,
preaching the gospel of work, denounced the actualities of Victorian
work. Dickens satirized the stock-promoter, the Manchester individ-
ualist, the utilitarian, the blustering self-made man: Balzac and Zola,
painting the new financial order with a documentary realism, left no
question as to its degradation and nastiness. Other artists turned with
Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites back to the Middle Ages, where Over-
beck and Hoffmann in Germany, and Chateaubriand and Hugo in
France, had preceded them: still others turned with Browning to
Renascence Italy, with Doughty to primitive Arabia, with Melville
and Gauguin to the South Seas, with Thoreau to the primeval woods,
with Tolstoy to the peasants. What did they seek? A few simple

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 205

things not to be found between the railroad terminal and the factory:
plain animal self-respect, color in the outer environment and emo-
tional depth in the inner landscape, a life lived for its own values,
instead of a life on the make. Peasants and savages had retained
some of these qualities: and to recover them became one of the main
duties of those who sought to supplement the iron fare of indus-
trialism.

15: Mechanical Triumphs

The human gains in the paleotechnic phase were small: perhaps
for the mass of the population non-existent: the progressive and
utilitarian John Stuart Mill, was at one here with the most bitter
critic of the new regime, John Ruskin. But a multitude of detailed
advances were made in technics itself. Not merely did the inventors
and machine-makers of the paleotechnic phase improve tools and
refine the whole apparatus of mechanical production, but its scientists
and philosophers, its poets and artists, helped lay the foundation for
a more humane culture than that which had prevailed even during
the eotechnic period. Though science was only sporadically applied
to industrial production, most notably perhaps, through Euler and
Camus, in the improvement of gears, the pursuit of science went on
steadily: the great advances made during the seventeenth century
were matched once more in the middle of the nineteenth in the
conceptual reorganization of every department of scientific thought —
advances to which we attach the names of von Meyer, Mendelev,
Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Claude Bernard, Johannes Muller, Darwin,
Mendel, Willard Gibbs, Mach, Quetelet, Marx, and Comte, to men-
tion only some of the outstanding figures. Through this scientific work,
technics itself entered a new phase, whose characteristics we shall
examine in the next chapter. The essential continuity of science and
technics remains a reality through all their shifts and phases.

The technical gains made during this phase were tremendous: it
was an era of mechanical realization when, at last, the ability of
the tool-makers and machine-makers had caught up with the demands
of the inventor. During this period the principal machine tools were
perfected, including the drill, the planer, and the lathe: power-pro-

206 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

pelled vehicles were created and their speeds were steadily increased:
the rotary press came into existence: the capacity to produce, manip-
late and transport vast masses of metal was enlarged: and many of
the chief mechanical instruments of surgery — including the stetho-
scope and the ophthalmoscope — ^were invented or perfected, albeit
one of the most notable advances in instrumentation, the use of the
obstetrical forceps, was a French invention during the eotechnic
phase. The extent of the gains can be made most clear if one con-
fines attention roughly to the first hundred years. Iron production
increased from 17,000 tons in 1740 to 2,100,000 tons in 1850. With
the invention in 1804 of a machine for dressing the cotton warps
with starch to prevent breaking, the power loom for cotton weaving
at last became practical: Horrocks’ invention of a successful loom
in 1803 and its improvement in 1813 transformed the cotton industry.
Because of the cheapness of hand workers — as late as 1834 it was
estimated that there were 45,000 to 50,000 in Scotland alone and
about 200,000 in England — ^power loom weaving came in slowly:
while in 1823 there were only 10,000 steam looms in Great Britain
in 1865 there were 400,000. These two industries serve as a fairly
accurate index of paleotechnic productivity.

Apart from the mass-production of clothes and the mass-distribu-
tion of foods, the great achievements of the paleotechnic phase were
not in the end-products but in the intermediate machines and utilities.
Above all, there was one department that was peculiarly its posses-
sion: the use of iron on a great scale. Here the engineers and workers
were on familiar groimd, and here, in the iron steamship, in the
iron bridge, in the skeleton tower, and in the machine-tools and
machines, they recorded their most decisive triumphs.

Both the iron bridge and the iron ship have a brief history. While
numerous designs for iron bridges were made in Italy by Leonardo
and his contemporaries, the first iron bridge in England was not
built till the end of the eighteenth century. The problems to be
worked out in the use of structural iron were all unfamiliar ones,
and while the engineer had recourse to mathematical assistance in
making and checking his calculations, the actual technique was in

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 207

advance of tlie mathematical expression. Here was a field for in-
genuity, daring experiment, bold departures.

In the course of less than a century the ironmakers and the struc-
tural engineers reached an astonishing perfection. The size of the
steamship increased speedily from the tiny Clermont, 133 feet long,
and 60 tons gross, to the Great Eastern, finished in 1858, the monster
of the Atlantic, with decks 691 feet long, 22,500 tons gross, capable
of generating 1600 H.P. in its screw engines and 1000 H.P. in its
paddle-wheel engines. The regularity of performance also increased:
by 1874 the City of Chester crossed the ocean regularly in eight
days and between 1 and 12 hours over, on eight successive voy-
ages. The rate of speed increased in crossing the Atlantic from the
twenty-six days made by the Savannah in 1819 to the seven days and
twenty hours made in 1866. This rate of increase tended to slacken
during the next seventy years: a fact equally true of railroad trans-
portation. "What held for speed held likewise for size, as the big
steamships lost by their bulk ease of handling in harbors and as
they reached the depths of the channel in safe harbors. The Great
Eastern was five times as big as the Clermont: the biggest steamship
today is less than twice as big as the Great Eastern. The speed of
transatlantic travel in 1866 was over three times as fast as in 1819
(47 years) but the present rate is less than twice as fast as 1866
(67 years). This holds true in numerous departments of technics:
acceleration and quantification and multiplication went on faster in
the early paleotechnic phase than they have gone on since in the
same province.

An early mastery was likewise achieved in the building of iron
structures. Perhaps the greatest monument of the period was the
Crystal Palace in England: a timeless building which binds together
the eotechnic phase, with its invention of the glass hothouse, the
paleotechnic, with its use of the glass-covered railroad shed, and
the neotechnic, with its fresh appreciation of sun and glass and
structural lightness. But the bridges were the more typical monu-
ments: not forgetting Telford’s iron chain suspension bridge over
Menai straits (1819-1825); the Brooklyn Bridge, begun in 1869
and the Firth of Forth bridge, a great cantilever construction, begxm

208 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

in 1867, were perhaps the most complete esthetic consummations of
the new industrial technique. Here the quantity of the material, even
the element of size itself, had a part in the esthetic result, emphasiz-
ing the difficulty of the task and the victory of the solution. In these
magnificent works the sloppy empiric habits of thought, the catch-
penny economies of the textile manufacturers, were displaced: such
methods, though they played a scandalous part in contributing to the
disasters of the early railroad and the early American river-steam-
boat, were at last sloughed off: an objective standard of performance
was set and achieved. Lord Kelvin was consulted by the Glasgow
shipbuilders in the working out of their difficult technical problems :
these machines and structures revealed an honest, justifiable pride
in confronting hard conditions and conquering obdurate materials.
"What Ruskin said in praise of the old wooden ships of the line
applies even more to their greater iron counterparts in the merchant
trade: it will bear repeating. “Take it all in all, a ship of the line
is the most honorable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has
produced. By himself, unhelped, he can do better things than ships
of the line; he can make poems and pictures, and other such concen-
trations of what is best in him. But as a being living in flocks and
hammering out, with alternate strokes and mutual agreement, what
is necessary for him in these flocks to get or produce, the ship of
the line is his first work. Into that he has put as much of his human
patience, common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self-
control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly wrought hard
work, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful patriotism,
and calm expectation of the judgment of God, as can well be put into
a space 300 feet long by 80 feet broad. And I am thankful to have
lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.”

This period of daring experimentation in iron structures reached
its climax in the early skyscrapers of Chicago, and in Eiffel’s great
bridges and viaducts: the famous Eiffel Tower of 1888 overtopped
these in height but not in mastery.

Ship-building and bridge-building, moreover, were extremely com-
plex tasks; they required a degree of inter-relation and co-ordination
that few industries, except possibly railroads, approached. These

THE PALEOTECHNIG PHASE

209

Structures called forth all the latent military virtues of the regime
and used them to good purpose: men risked their lives with superb
nonchalance every day, smelting the iron, hammering and riveting
the steel, working on narrow platforms and slender beams; and there
was little distinction in the course of production between the engineer,
the foremen, and the common workers: each had his share in the
common task; each faced the danger. When the Brooklyn Bridge was
being built, it was the Master Mechanic, not a common workman,
who first tested the carriage that was used to string the cable. William
Morris characterized the new steamships, with true insight, as the
Cathedrals of the Industrial Age. He was right. They brought forth
a fuller orchestration of the arts and sciences than any other work
that the paleotects were engaged upon, and the final product was a
miracle of compactness, speed, power, inter-relation, and esthetic
unity. The steamer and the bridge were tlie new symphonies in steel.
Hard grim men produced them: wage slaves or taskmasters. But like
the Egyptian stone carver many thousand years before they knew
the joy of creative effort. The arts of the drawing room wilted in
comparison. The masculine reek of the forge was a sweeter perfume
than any the ladies affected.

In hack of all these efforts was a new race of artists: the English
toolmakers of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century.
These toolmakers sprang by necessity out of two dissimilar habitats:
the machine works of Bolton and Watt and the wood-working shop
of Joseph Bramah. In looking around for a workman to carry out
a newly patented lock, Bramah seized on Henry Maudslay, a bright
young mechanic who had begun work in the Woolwich Arsenal.
Maudslay became not merely one of the most skilled mechanics of
all time: his passion for exact work led him to bring order into the
making of the essential parts of machines, above all, machine-
screws. Up to this time screws had been usually cut by hand: they
were difficult to make and expensive and were used as little as
possible: no system was observed as to pitch or form of the threads.
Every bolt and nut, as Smiles remarks, was a sort of specialty in
itself. Maudslay’s screw-cutting lathe was one of the decisive pieces
of standardization that made the modem machine possible. He car-

210 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

ried the spirit of the artist into every department of machine making:
standardizing, refining, reducing to exact dimensions. Thanks to
Maudslay interior angles, instead of being in the sharp form of an
L were curved. Maudslay was used by M. I. Brunei to make his
tackle-block machine; and out of his workshop, trained by his exact
methods, came an apostolic succession of mechanics: Nasmyth,
who invented the steam hammer, Whitworth, who perfected the rifle
and the cannon, Roberts, Muirs, and Lewis. Another great mechanic
of the time, Clement, also trained by Bramah, worked on Babbage’s
calculating machine, between 1823 and 1842 — ^the most refined and
intricate mechanism, according to Roe, that had so far been pro-
duced.

These men spared no effort in their machine-work: they worked
toward perfection, without attempting to meet the cheaper compe-
tition of inferior craftsmen. There were, of course, men of similar
stamp in America, France, and Germany: but for the finest work the
English toolmakers commanded an international market. Their pro-
ductions, ultimately, made the steamship and the iron bridge possible.
The remark of an old workman of Maudslay’s can well bear repe-
tition: “It was a pleasure to see him handle a tool of any kind, but
he was quite splendid with an eighteen inch file.” That was the tribute
of a competent critic to an excellent artist. And it is in machines
that one must seek the most original examples of directly paleo-
technic art.

16: The Paleotechnic Passage

The paleotechnic phase, then, did two things. It explored the Hind
alleys, the ultimate abysses, of a quantitative conception of life,
stimulated by the will-to-power and regulated only by the conflict of
one power-unit — an individual, a class, a state — ^with another power-
unit. And in the mass-production of goods it showed that mechanical
improvements alone were not sufficient to produce socially valuable
results — or even the highest degree of industrial efficiency.

The ultimate outcome over this over-stressed power ideology and
this constant struggle was the World War — that period of senseless
strife which came to a head in 1914 and is still being fought out

THE PALEOTECHNIC PHASE 211

by the frustrated populations that have come under the machine
system. This process can have no other end than an impotent victory:
the extinction of both sides together, or the suicide of the successful
nation at the very moment that it has finished slaughtering its victim.
Though for convenience I have talked of the paleotechnic phase in
its past tense, it is still with us, and the methods and habits of thought
it has produced still rule a great part of mankind. If they are not
supplanted, the very basis of technics itself may be undermined, and
our relapse into barbarism will go on at a speed directly propor-
tional to the complication and refinement of our present technolog-
ical inheritance.

But the truly significant part of the paleotechnic phase lay not
in what it produced but in what it led to: it was a period of transi-
tion, a busy, congested, rubbish-strewn avenue between the eotechnic
and the neotechnic economies. Institutions do not affect human life
only directly: they also affect it by reason of the contrary reactions
they produce. While humanly speaking the paleotechnic phase was
a disastrous interlude, it helped by its very disorder to intensify
the search for order, and by its special forms of brutality to clarify
the goals of humane living. Action and reaction were equal — and in
opposite directions.

CHAPTER V.

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

1: The Beginnings of Neotechnics

The neotechnic phase represents a third definite development in
the machine during the last thousand years. It is a true mutation: it
differs from the paleotechnic phase almost as white differs from
black. But on the other hand, it bears the same relation to the
eotechnic phase as the adult form does to the baby.

During the neotechnic phase, the conceptions, the anticipations,
the imperious visions of Roger Bacon, Leonardo, Lord Verulam,
Porta, Glanvill, and the other philosophers and technicians of that
day at last found a local habitation. The first hasty sketches of the
fifteenth century were now turned into working drawings: the first
guesses were now re-enforced with a technique of verification: the
first crude machines were at last carried to perfection in the exquisite
mechanical technology of the new age, which gave to motors and
turbines properties that had but a century earlier belonged almost
exclusively to the clock. The superb animal audacity of Cellini, about
to cast his difficult Perseus, or the scarcely less daring work of
Michelangelo, constructing the dome of St. Peter’s, was replaced by
a patient co-operative experimentalism: a whole society was now
prepared to do what had heretofore been the burden of solitary
individuals.

Now, while the neotechnic phase is a definite physical and social
complex, one cannot define it as a period, partly because it has not
yet developed its own form and organization, partly because we
are still in the midst of it and cannot see its details in their ultimate
relationships, and partly, because it has not displaced the older

212

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

213

regime with anything like the speed and decisiveness that character-
ized the transformation of the eotechnic order in the late eighteenth
century. Emerging from the paleotechnic order, the neotechnic insti-
tutions have nevertheless in many cases compromised with it, given
way before it, lost their identity by reason of the weight of vested
interests that continued to support the obsolete instruments and the
anti-social aims of the middle industrial era. Paleotechnic ideals
still largely dominate the industry and the politics of the Western
World: the class struggles and the national struggles are still pushed
with relentless vigor. While eotechnic practices linger on as civilizing
influences, in gardens and parks and painting and music and the
theater, the paleotechnic remains a barbarizing influence. To deny
this would be to cling to a fool’s paradise. In the seventies Melville
framed a question in fumbling verse whose significance has deepened
with the intervening years:

. . . Arts are tools;

But tools, they say, are to the strong:

Is Satan weak? Weak is the wrong?

No blessed augury overrules:

Your arts advanced in faith’s decay:

You are but drilling the new Hun

Whose growl even now can some dismay.

To the extent that neotechnic industry has failed to transform the
coal-and-iron complex, to the extent that it has failed to secure an
adequate foundation for its humaner technology in the community
as a whole, to the extent that it has lent its heightened powers to
the miner, the financier, the militarist, the possibilities of disruption
and chaos have increased.

But the beginnings of the neotechnic phase can nevertheless be
approximately fixed. The first definite change, which increased the
efliciency of prime movers enormously, multiplying it from three
to nine times, was the perfection of the water-turbine by Fourneyron
in 1832. This came at the end of a long series of studies, begun
empirically in the development of the spoon-wheel in the sixteenth
century and carried on scientifically by a series of investigators.

214 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

notably Euler in the middle of the eighteenth century. Burdin,
Foumeyron’s master, had made a series of improvements in the
turbine type of water-wheel — a development for which one may
perhaps thank France’s relative backwardness in paleotechnic in-
dustry — and Fourneyron built a single turbine of 50 H.P. as early
as 1832. With this, one must associate a series of important scientific
discoveries made by Faraday during the same decade. One of these
was his isolation of benzine: a liquid that made possible the com-
mercial utilization of rubber. The other was his work on electro-
magnetic currents, beginning with his discovery in 1831 that a con-
ductor cutting the lines of force of a magnet created a difference
in potential: shortly after he made this purely scientific discovery,
he received an anonymous letter suggesting that the principle might
be applied to the creation of great machines. Coming on top of the
important work done by Volta, Galvani, Oersted, Ohm, and Ampere,
Faraday’s work on electricity, coupled with Joseph Henry’s exactly
contemporary research on the electro-magnet, erected a new basis for
the conversion and distribution of energy and for most of the decisive
neotechnic inventions.

By 1850 a good part of the fundamental scientific discoveries and
inventions of the new phase had been made: the electric cell, the
storage cell, the dynamo, the motor, the electric lamp, the spec-
troscope, the doctrine of the conservation of energy. Between 1875
and 1900 the detailed application of these inventions to industrial
processes was carried out in the electric power station and the tele-
phone and the radio telegraph. Finally, a series of complementary
inventions, the phonograph, the moving picture, the gasoline engine,
the steam turbine, the airplane, were all sketched in, if not perfected,
by 1900: these in turn effected a radical transformation of the power
plant and the factory, and they had further effects in suggesting new
principles for the design of cities and for the utilization of the
environment as a whole. By 1910 a definite counter-march against
paleotechnic methods began in industry itself.

The outlines of the process were blurred by the explosion of the
World War and by the sordid disorders and reversions and com-
pensations that followed it. Though the instruments of a neotechnic

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

215

civilization are now at hand, and though many definite signs of an
integration are not lacking, one cannot say confidently that a single
region, much less our Western Civilization as a whole, has entirely
embraced the neotechnic complex: for the necessary social institu-
tions and the explicit social purposes requisite even for complete
technological fulfillment are lacking. The gains in technics are
never registered automatically in society: they require equally adroit
inventions and adaptations in politics; and the careless habit of
attributing to mechanical improvements a direct role as instruments
of culture and civilization puts a demand upon the machine to which
it cannot respond. Lacking a cooperative social intelligence and
good-will, our most refined technics promises no more for society’s
improvement than an electric hulb would promise to a monkey in
the midst of a jungle.

True: the industrial world produced during the nineteenth cen-
tury is either technologically obsolete or socially dead. But unfor-
tunately, its maggoty corpse has produced organisms which in turn
may debilitate or possibly kill the new order that should take its
place: perhaps leave it a hopeless cripple. One of the first steps, how-
ever, toward combating such disastrous results is to realize that even
technically the Machine Age does not form a continuous and har-
monious unit, that there is a deep gap between the paleotechnic and
neotechnic phases, and that the habits of mind and the tactics we
have carried over from the old order are obstacles in the way of our
developing the new.

2: The Importance of Science

The detailed history of the steam engine, the railroad, the textile
mill, the iron ship, could be written without more than passing refer-
ence to the scientific work of the period. For these devices were
made possible largely by the method of empirical practice, by trial
and selection: many lives were lost by the explosion of steam-
boilers before the safety-valve was generally adopted. And though
all these inventions would have been the better for science, they
came into existence, for the most part, without its direct aid. It was
the practical men in the mines, the factories, the machine shops

216 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

and the clockmakers’ shops and the locksmiths’ shops or the curi-
ous amateurs with a turn for manipulating materials and imagining
new processes, who made them possible. Perhaps the only scientific
work that steadily and systematically affected the paleotechnic design
was the analysis of the elements of mechanical motion itself.

With the neotechnic phase, two facts of critical importance become
plain. First, the scientific method, whose chief advances had been in
mathematics and the physical sciences, took possession of other
domains of experience: the living organism and human society also
became the objects of systematic investigation, and though the work
done in these departments was handicapped by the temptation to
take over the categories of thought, the modes of investigation, and
the special apparatus of quantitative abstraction developed for the
isolated physical world, the extension of science here was to have
a particularly important effect upon technics. Physiology became
for the nineteenth century what mechanics had been for the seven-
teenth: instead of mechanism forming a pattern for life, living
organisms began to form a pattern for mechanism. Whereas the
mine dominated the paleotechnic period, it was the vineyard and
the farm and the physiological laboratory that directed many of
the most fruitful investigations and contributed to some of the most
radical inventions and discoveries of the neotechnic phase.

Similarly, the study of human life and society profited by the
same impulses toward order and clarity. Here the paleotechnic phase
had succeeded only in giving rise to the abstract series of rationaliza-
tions and apologies which bore the name of political economy: a
body of doctrine that had almost no relation to the actual organiza-
tion of production and consumption or to the real needs and interests
and habits of human society. Even Karl Marx, in criticizing these
doctrines, succumbed to their misleading verbalisms: so that
whereas Das Kapital is full of great historic intuitions, its descrip-
tion of price and value remains as prescientific as Ricardo’s. The
abstractions of economics, instead of being isolates and derivatives
of reality, were in fact mythological constructions whose only justi-
fication would be in the impulses they excited and the actions they
prompted. Following Vico, Condorcet, Herder and G. F. Hegel, who

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

217

were philosophers of history, Comte, Quetelet, and Le Play laid
down the new science of sociology; while on the heels of the abstract
psychologists from Locke and Hume onward, the new observers of
human nature, Bain, Herbart, Darwin, Spencer, and Fechner inte-
grated psychology with biology and studied the mental processes as
a function of all animal behavior.

In short, the concepts of science, hitherto associated largely with
the cosmic, the inorganic, the “mechanical” were now applied to
every phase of human experience and every manifestation of life.
The analysis of matter and motion, which had greatly simplified the
original tasks of science, now ceased to exhaust the circle of scien-
tific interests: men sought for an underlying order and logic of
events which would embrace more complex manifestations. The
Ionian philosophers had long ago had a clue to the importance of
order itself in the constitution of the universe. But in the visible
chaos of Victorian society Newlands’ original formulation of the
periodic table as the Law of Octaves was rejected, not because it was
insufficient, but because Nature was deemed unlikely to arrange
the elements in such a regular horizontal and vertical pattern.

During the neotechnic phase, the sense of order became much
more pervasive and fundamental. The blind whirl of atoms no longer
seemed adequate even as a metaphorical description of the universe.
During this phase, the hard and fast nature of matter itself under-
went a change: it became penetrable to newly discovered electric im-
pulses, and even the alchemist’s original guess about the transmuta-
tion of the elements was turned, through the discovery of radium,
into a reality. The image changed from “solid matter” to “flowing
energy.”

Second only to the more comprehensive attack of the scientific
method upon aspects of existence hitherto only feebly touched by
it, was the direct application of scientific knowledge to technics and
the conduct of life. In the neotechnic phase, the main initiative comes,
not from the ingenious inventor, but from the scientist who establishes
the general law: the invention is a derivative product. It was Henry
who in essentials invented the telegraph, not Morse; it was Faraday
who invented the dynamo, not Siemens; it was Oersted who invented

218 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the electric motor, not Jacobi; it was Clerk-Maxwell and Hertz who
invented the radio telegraph, not Marconi and De Forest. The transla-
tion of the scientific knowledge into practical instruments was a mere
incident in the process of invention. While distinguished individual
inventors like Edison, Baekeland and Sperry remained, the new in-
ventive genius worked on the materials provided by science.

Out of this habit grew a new phenomenon: deliberate and sys-
tematic invention. Here was a new material: problem — ^find a new
use for it. Or here was a necessary utility: problem — find the
theoretic formula which would permit it to be produced. The ocean
cable was finally laid only when Lord Kelvin had contributed the
necessary scientific analysis of the problem it presented: the thrust
of the propeller shaft on the steamer was finally taken up without
clumsy and expensive mechanical devices, only when Michell worked
out the behavior of viscous fluids: long distance telephony was made
possible only by systematic research by Pupin and others in the
Bell Laboratories on the several elements in the problem. Isolated
inspiration and empirical fumbling came to count less and less in
invention. In a whole series of characteristic neotechnic inventions
the thought was father to the wish. And typically, this thought is a
collective product.

While the independent theoretic mind was still, naturally, im-
mensely stimulated by the suggestions and needs of practical life,
as Carnot had been stirred to his researches on heat by the steam
engine, as the chemist, Louis Pasteur, was stirred to bacteriological
research by the predicament of the vintners, brewers, and silkworm
growers, the fact was that a liberated scientific curiosity might at any
moment prove as valuable as the most factual pragmatic research.
Indeed, this freedom, this remoteness, this contemplative isolation,
so foreign to the push of practical success and the lure of immediate
applications, began to fill up a general reservoir of ideas, which
flowed over, as if by gravity, into practical affairs. The possibilities
for human life could be gauged by the height of the reservoir itself,
rather than by the pressure the derivative stream might show at
any moment. And though science had been impelled, from the be-
ginning, by practical needs and by the desire for magical controls.

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 219

quite as much perhaps as by the will-to-order, it came during the
nineteenth century to act as a counterweight to the passionate desire
to reduce all existence to terms of immediate profit and success. The
scientists of the first order, a Faraday, a Clerk-Maxwell, a Gibbs,
were untouched by pragmatic sanctions: for them science existed, as
the arts exist, not simply as a means of exploiting nature, but as a
mode of life: good for the states of mind they produce as well as
for the external conditions they change.

Other civilizations reached a certain stage of technical perfec-
tion and stopt there: they could only repeat the old patterns. Technics
in its traditional forms provided no means of continuing its own
growth. Science, by joining on to technics, raised so to say the ceil-
ing of technical achievement and widened its potential cruising area.
In the interpretation and application of science a new group of
men appeared, or rather, an old profession took on new importance.
Intermediate between the industrialist, the common workman, and
the scientific investigator came the engineer.

We have seen how engineering as an art goes back to antiquity,
and how the engineer began to develop as a separate entity as a
result of military enterprise from the fourteenth century onward,
designing fortifications, canals, and weapons of assault. The first
great school devised for the training of engineers was the Ecole
Polytechnique, founded in Paris in 1794 in the midst of the revolu-
tion: the school at St. Etienne, the Berlin Polytechnic and Rensselaer
(1824) came shortly after it: but it was only in the middle of the
nineteenth century that South Kensington, Stevens, Zurich, and
other schools followed. The new engineers must master all the prob-
lems involved in the development of the new machines and utilities,
and in the application of the new forms of energy: the range of the
profession must in all its specialized branches be as wide as Leon-
ardo’s had been in its primitive relatively undifferentiated state.

Already in 1825 Auguste Comte could say:

“It is easy to recognize in the scientific body as it now exists a
certain number of engineers distinct from men of science properly
so-called. This important class arose of necessity when Theory and
Practice, which set out from such distant points, had approached

220 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

sxiiEciendy to give each other the hand. It is this that makes its dis-
tinctive character still so undefined. As to characteristic doctrines
fitted to constitute the special existence of the class of engineers, their
true nature cannot be easily indicated because their rudiments only
exist. . . . The establishment of the class of engineers in its proper
characteristics is the more important because this class will, without
doubt, constitute the direct and necessary instrument of coalition be-
tween men of science and industrialists by which alone the new social
order can commence.” (Comte: Fourth Essay, 1825.)

The situation to which Comte looked forward did not become pos-
sible until the neotechnic phase itself had begun to emerge. As the
methods of exact analysis and controlled observation began to pene-
trate every department of activity, the concept of the engineer
broadened to the more general notion of technician. More and more,
each of the arts sought for itself a basis in exact knowledge. The
infusion of exact, scientific methods into every department of work
and action, from architecture to education, to some extent increased
the scope and power of the mechanical world-picture that had been
built up in the seventeenth century: for technicians tended to take
the world of the physical scientist as tfie most real section of experi-
ence, because it happened, on the whole, to be the most measurable ;
and they were sometimes satisfied with superficial investigations as
long as they exhibited the general form of the exact sciences. The
specialized, one-sided, factual education of the engineer, the absence
of humanistic interests in both the school of engineering itself and
the environment into which the engineer was thrust, only accentuated
these limitations. Those interests to which Thomas Mann teasingly
introduced his half-baked nautical engineer in The Magic Mountain,
the interests of philosophy, religion, politics, and love, were absent
from the utilitarian world: but in the long run, the broader basis of
the neotechnic economy itself was to have an efiEect, and the restora-
tion of the humanities in the California Institute of Technology and
the Stevens Institute was a significant step toward repairing the
breach that was opened in the seventeenth century. Unlike the paleo-
technic economy, which had grown so exclusively out of the mine,
the neotechnic economy was applicable at every point in the valley

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 221

section — as important in its bacteriology for the farmer as in its
psychology for the teacher.

3: New Sources of Energy

The neotechnic phase was marked, to begin with, by the conquest
of a new form of energy: electricity. The lodestone and the properties
of amber when rubbed were both known to the Greeks; but the first
modem treatise on electricity dates back to Dr. John Gilbert’s De
Magnate, published in 1600. Dr. Gilbert related frictional elec-
tricity to magnetism, and after him the redoubtable burgomaster
of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke, he of the Magdeburg hemi-
spheres, recognized the phenomenon of repulsion, as well as attrac-
tion, while Leibniz apparently was the first to observe the electric
spark. In the eighteenth century, with the invention of the Leyden
jar, and with Franklin’s discovery that lightning and electricity were
one, the experimental work in this field began to take shape. By 1840
the preliminary scientific exploration was done, thanks to Oersted,
Ohm, and above all, to Faraday; and in 1838 Joseph Henry had even
observed the inductive effects at a distance from a Leyden jar; the
first hint of radio communication.

Technics did not lag behind science. By 1838 Professor Jacobi, at
St. Petersburg, had succeeded in propelling a boat on the Neva at
four miles an hour by means of an “electro-magnetic engine,” David-
son on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway achieved the same speed;
while in 1849 Professor Page attained a speed of 19 miles per hour
on a car on the Baltimore and Washington Railroad. The electric
arc light was patented in 1846 and applied to the lighthouse at
Dungeness, England, in 1862. Meanwhile, a dozen forms of the elec-
tric telegraph had been invented: by 1839 Morse and Steinheil had
made possible instantaneous communication over long distances,
using grounded wires at either end. The practical development of
the dynamo by Wemer Siemens (1866) and the alternator by
Nikola Tesla (1887) were the two necessary steps in the substi-
tution of electricity for steam: the central power station and dis-
tribution system, invented by Edison (1882) presently developed.

In the application of power, electricity effected revolutionary

222 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

changes: these touched the location and the concentration of indus-
tries and the detailed organization of the factory — as well as a mul-
titude of inter-related services and institutions. The metallurgical
industries were transformed and certain industries like rubber pro-
duction were stimulated. Let us look more closely at some of these
changes.

During the paleotechnic phase, industry depended completely
upon the coal mine as a source of power. Heavy industries were
compelled to settle close to the mine itself, or to cheap means of
transportation by means of the canal and the railroad. Electricity,
on the other hand, can be developed by energy from a large number
of sources: not merely coal, but the rapidly running river, the falls,
the swift tidal estuary are available for energy; so are the direct
rays of the sunlight (7000 H.P. per sun-acre) for the sun-batteries
that have been built in Egypt; so too is the windmill, when accumula-
tors are provided. Inaccessible mountain areas, like those in the Alps,
the Tyrol, Norway, the Rockies, interior Africa, became for the
first time potential sources of power and potential sites for modem
industry: the harnessing of water-power, thanks to the supreme effi-
ciency of the water-turbine, which rates around 90 per cent, opened
up new sources of energy and new areas for colonization — areas
more irregular in topography and often more salubrious in climate
than the valley-bottoms and lowlands of the earlier eras. Because of
the enormous vested interest in coal measures, the cheaper sources
of energy have not received sufficient systematic attention upon the
part of inventors: but the present utilization of solar energy in
agriculture — about 0.13 per cent of the total amount of solar energy
received — ^presents a challenge to the scientific engineer; while the
possibility of using differences of temperature between the upper
and lower levels of sea water in the tropics offers still another pros-
pect for escaping servitude to coal.

The availability of water-power for producing energy, finally,
changes the potential distribution of modern industry throughout the
planet, and reduces the peculiar industrial dominance that Europe
and the United States held under the coal-and-iron regime. For Asia
and South America are almost as well endowed with water-power —

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 223

over fifty million horsepower each — ^as the older industrial regions,
and Africa has three times as much as either Europe or North
America. Even within Europe and the United States a shifting of the
industrial center of gravity is taking place: thus the leadership in
hydro-electric power development has gone to Italy, France, Norway,
Switzerland and Sweden in the order named, and a similar shift is
taking place toward the two great spinal mountain-systems of the
United States. The coal measures are no longer the exclusive meas-
ures of industrial power.

Unlike coal in long distance transportation, or like steam in local
distribution, electricity is much easier to transmit without heavy
losses of energy and higher costs. Wires carrying high tension alter-
nating currents can cut across mountains which no road vehicle can
pass over; and once an electric power utility is established the rate of
deterioriation is slow. Moreover, electricity is readily convertible
into various forms: the motor, to do mechanical work, the electric
lamp, to light, the electric radiator, to heat, the x-ray tube and the
ultra-violet light, to penetrate and explore, and the selenium cell, to
effect automatic control.

While small dynamos are less eflScient than large dynamos, the
difference in performance between the two is much less than that
between the big steam-engine and the small steam-engine. When the
water-turbine can be used, the advantage of being able to use elec-
tricity with high efficiency in all sizes and power-ratings becomes
plain: if there is not a sufficiently heavy head of water to operate a
large alternator, excellent work can nevertheless be done for a small
industrial unit, like a farm, by harnessing a small brook or stream
and using only a few horsepower; and by means of a small auxiliary
gasoline engine continuous operation can be assured despite sea-
sonal fluctuations in the flow of the water. The water turbine has the
great advantage of being automatic: once installed, the costs of
production are almost nil, since no fireman or attendant is neces-
sary. With larger central power stations there are other advantages.
Not all power need be absorbed by the local area: by a system of
interlinked stations, surplus power may be transmitted over long
distances, and in case of a breakdown in a single plant the supply

224 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

itself will remain adequate by turning on the current from the asso-
ciated plants.

4: The Displacement of the Proletariat

The typical productive units of the paleotechnic period were
afflicted with giantism: they increased in size and agglomerated to-
gether without attempting to scale size to efficiency. In part this
grew out of the defective system of communication which antedated
the telephone: this confined efficient administration to a single manu-
facturing plant and made it difficult to disperse the several units,
whether or not they were needed on a single site. It was likewise
abetted by the difficulties of economic power production with small
steam engines: so the engineers tended to crowd as many produc-
tive units as possible on the same shaft, or within the range of
steam pressure through pipes limited enough to avoid excessive
condensation losses. The driving of the individual machines in the
plant from a single shaft made it necessary to spot the machines
along the shafting, without close adjustment to the topographical
needs of the work itself: there were friction losses in the belting, and
the jungle of belts offered special dangers to the workers: in addi-
tion to these defects, the shafting and belting limited the use of
local transport by means of travelling cranes.

The introduction of the electric motor worked a transformation
within the plant itself. For the electric motor created flexibility in
the design of the factory: not merely could individual units be placed
where they were wanted, and not merely could they be designed for
the particular work needed: but the direct drive, which increased
the efficiency of the motor, also made it possible to alter the layout
of the plant itself as needed. The installation of motors removed the
belts which cut off light and lowered efficiency, and opened the way
for the rearrangement of machines in functional units without regard
for the shafts and aisles of the old-fashioned factory: each unit
could work at its own rate of speed, and start and stop to suit its
own needs, without power losses through the operation of the plant
as a whole. According to the calculations of a German engineer, this
has raised the performance fifty per cent in efficiency. Where large

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

225

units were handled, the automatic servicing of the machines through
travelling cranes now became simple. All these developments have
come about during the last forty years; 'and it goes without saying
that it is only in the more advanced plants that all these refinements
and economies in operation have been embraced.

With the use of electricity, as Henry Ford has pointed out, small
units of production can nevertheless be utilized by large units of
administration, for efficient administration depends upon record-
keeping, charting, routing, and communication, and not necessarily
upon a local overseership. In a word, the size of the productive unit
is no longer determined by the local requirements of either the steam
engine or the managerial staff: it is a function of the operation itself.
But the efficiency of small units worked by electric motors utilizing
current either from local turbines or from a central power plant has
given small-scale industry a new lease on life: on a purely technical
basis it can, for the first time since the introduction of the steam
engine, compete on even terras with the larger unit. Even domestic
production has become possible again through the use of electricity:
for if the domestic grain grinder is less efficient, from a purely me-
chanical standpoint, than the huge flour mills of Minneapolis, it per-
mits a nicer timing of production to need, so that it is no longer
necessary to consume bolted white flours because whole wheat flours
deteriorate more quickly and spoil if they are ground too long before
they are sold and used. To be efficient, the small plant need not re-
main in continuous operation nor need it produce gigantic quantities
of foodstuffs and goods for a distant market: it can respond to local
demand and supply; it can operate on an irregular basis, since the
overhead for permanent staff and equipment is proportionately
smaller; it can take advantage of smaller wastes of time and energy
in transportation, and by face to face contact it can cut out the
inevitable red-tape of even efficient large organizations.

As an element in large-scale standardized industry, making prod-
ucts for a continental market, the small plant can now survive.
“There is no point,” as Henry Ford says, “in centralizing manufac-
turing unless it results in economies. If we, for instance, centered
our entire production in Detroit we should have to employ about

226 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

6,000,000 people. ... A product that is used all over the country
ought to be made all over the country, in order to distribute buying
power more evenly. For many years we have followed the policy of
making in our branches whatever parts they were able to make for
the area they served. A good manufacturer who makes himself a
specialist will closely control his production and is to he preferred
over a branch.” And again Ford says: “In our first experimenting
... we thought that we had to have the machine lines with their
assembly and also the final assembly all under one roof, but as we
grew in imderstanding we learned that the making of each part was
a separate business in itself, and to be made wherever it could be
made the most efiiciently, and that the final assembly line could be
anywhere. This gave us the first evidence of the flexibility of mod-
ern production, as well as indication of the savings that might be
made in cutting down unnecessary shipping.”

Even without the use of electric power the small workshop, be-
cause of some of the above facts, has survived all over the world,
in defiance of the confident expectations of the early Victorian eco-
nomists, marvelling over the mechanical efficiency of the monster
textile mills: with electricity, the advantages of size from any point
of view, except in possible special operations like the production of
iron, becomes questionable. In the production of steel from scrap
iron the electric furnace may be used economically for operations on
a much smaller scale than the blast-furnace permits. Moreover, the
weakest part mechanically of automatic production lies in the ex-
pense and hand-labor involved in preparation for shipment. To the
extent that a local market and a direct service does away with these
operations it removes a costly and completely uneducative form of
work. Bigger no longer automatically means better: flexibility of
the power unit, closer adaptation of means to ends, nicer timing of
operation, are the new marks of efficient industry. So far as concen-
tration may remain, it is largely a phenomenon of the market, rather
than of technics: promoted by astute financiers who see in the large
organization an easier mechanism for their manipulations of credit,
for their inflation of capital values, for their monopolistic controls.

The electric power plant is not merely the driving force in the

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 227

new technology: it is likewise perhaps one of the most characteristic
end-products ; for it is in itself an exhibition of that complete automa-
tism to which, as Mr. Fred Henderson and Mr. Walter Polakov have
ably demonstrated, our modem system of power production tends.
From the movement of coal off the railroad truck or the coal barge,
by means of a travelling crane, operated by a single man, to the
stoking of the coal in the furnace by a mechanical feeder, power
machinery takes the place of human energy: the worker, instead of
being a source of work, becomes an observer and regulator of the
performance of the machines — a supervisor of production rather than
an active agent. Indeed the direct control of the local worker is the
same in principle as the remote control of the management itself,
supervising, through reports and charts, the flow of power and
goods through the entire plant.

The qualities the new worker needs are alertness, responsiveness,
an intelligent grasp of the operative parts: in short, he must be an
all-round mechanic rather than a specialized hand. Short of complete
automatism, this process is still a dangerous one for the worker: for
partial automatism had been reached in the textile plants in England
by the eighteen-fifties without any great release of the human spirit.
But with complete automatism freedom of movement and initiative
return for that small part of the original working force now needed
to operate the plant. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that one
of the most important labor-saving and drudgery-saving devices, the
mechanical firing of boilers, was invented at tlie height of the paleo-
technic period: in 1845. But it did not begin to spread rapidly in
power plants until 1920, by which time coal had begun to feel com-
petition from automatic oil burners. (Another great economy in-
vented in the same year [1845], the use of blast-furnace gases for
fuel, did not come in till much later.)

In all the neotechnic industries that produce completely stand-
ardized goods, automatism in operation is the goal toward which
they tend. But, as Barnett points out, “the displacing power of ma-
chines varies widely. One man on the stone-planer is capable of pro-
ducing as much as eight men can produce by hand. One man on the
semi-automatic bottle machine can make as many as four hand-

228 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

blowers, A linotype operator can set up as much matter as four
hand-compositors. The Owens bottle machine in its latest form is
capable of an output per operative equal to that of eighteen hand-
blowers,” To which one may add that in the automatic telephone
exchange the number of operators has been reduced about eighty
per cent, and in an American textile plant a single worker can look
after 1200 spindles. While the deadliest form of high-paced, piece-
meal, unvaried labor still remain in many so-called advance indus-
tries, like the straight-line assemblage of Ford cars, a form of work
as dehumanized and as backward as any practiced in the worst manu-
facturing processes of the eighteenth century — ^while this is true, in
the really neotechnic industries and processes the worker has been
almost eliminated.

Power production and automatic machines have steadily been
diminishing the worker’s importance in factory production. Two
million workers were cast out between 1919 and 1929 in the United
States, while production itself actually increased. Less than a tenth
of the population of the United States is sufficient to produce the
bulk of its manufactured goods and its mechanical services. Benjamin
Franklin figured that in his day the spread of work and the elimina-
tion of the kept classes would enable all the necessary production
to be accomplished with an annual toll of five hours per worker per
day. Even with our vast increase in consumptive standards, both in
intermediate machines and utilities and in final goods, a fragment of
that time would probably suffice for a neotechnic industry, if it were
organized efficiently on a basis of steady, full-time production.

Parallel to the advances of electricity and metallurgy from 1870
onward were the advances that took place in chemistry. Indeed,
the emergence of the chemical industries after 1870 is one of the
definite signs of the neotechnic order, since the advance beyond the
age-old empirical methods used, for example, in distilling and in the
manufacture of soap naturally was limited by the pace of science
itself. Chemistry not merely assumed a relatively larger share in
every phase of industrial production from metallurgy to the fabrica-
tion of artificial silk: but the chemical industries themselves, by
their very nature, exhibited the characteristic neotechnic features a

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 229

whole generation before mechanical industry showed them. Here
Matare’s figures, though they are almost a generation old, are still
significant: in the advanced mechanical industries only 2.8 per cent
of the entire personnel were technicians : in the old-fashioned chemi-
cal industries, such as vinegar works and breweries, there were 2.9
per cent; but in the more recent chemical industries, dyes, starch
products, gas works, and so forth, 7.1 per cent of the personnel were
technicians. Similarly, the processes themselves tend to be automatic,
and the percentage of workers employed is smaller than even in
advanced machine industries, while workers who supervise them
must have similar capacities to those at the remote control boards
of a power station or a steamship. Here, as in neotechnic industry
generally, advances in production increase the number of trained
technicians in the laboratory and decrease the number of human
robots in the plant. In short, one witnesses in the chemical processes
— apart from the ultimate packaging and boxing — ^the general change
that characterizes all genuinely neotechnic industry: the displacement
of the proletariat.

That these gains in automatism and power have not yet been assimi-
lated by society is plain; and I shall revert to the problem here
presented in the final chapter.

5: Neotechnic Materials

Just as one associates the wind and water power of the eotechnic
economy with the use of wood and glass, and the coal of the paleo-
technic period with iron, so does electricity bring into wide industrial
use its own specific materials: in particular, the new alloys, the
rare earths, and the lighter metals. At the same time, it creates a
new series of synthetic compounds that supplement paper, glass and
wood: celluloid, vulcanite, bakelite and the synthetic resins, with
special properties of unbreakability, electrical resistance, impervious-
ness to acids, or elasticity.

Among the metals, electricity places a premium upon those that
have a high degree of conductivity: copper and aluminum. Area for
area, copper is almost twice as good a conductor as aluminum but
weight for weight aluminum is superior to any other metal, even

230 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

silver, while iron and nickel are practically useless except where
resistance is needed, as for example in electric heating. Perhaps
the most distinctively neotechnic metal is aluminum, for it was
discovered in 1825 by the Dane, Oersted, one of the fruitful early
experimenters with electricity, and it remained a mere curiosity
of the laboratory through the high paleotechnic period. It was not
imtil 1886, the decade that saw the invention of the motion picture
and the discovery of the Hertzian wave, that patents for making
aluminum commercially were taken out. One need not wonder at
aluminum’s slow development: for the commercial process of ex-
traction is dependent upon the use of large quantities of electric
energy: the principal cost of reducing the aluminum ore by the
electrolytic process is the use of from ten to twelve kilowatt hours
of energy for every pound of metal recovered. Hence the industry
must naturally attach itself to a cheap source of electric power.

Aluminum is the third most abundant element on the earth’s
crust, following oxygen and silicon; but at present it is manufactured
chiefly from its hydrated oxide, bauxite. If the extraction of alumi-
num from clay is not yet commercially feasible, no one can doubt
that an effective means will eventually be found: hence the supply of
aluminum is practically inexhaustible, all the more because its slow
oxidation permits society to build up steadily a reserve of scrap
metal. This entire development has taken place over a period of little
more than forty years, those same forty years that saw the introduc-
tion of central power plants and multiple motor installations in fac-
tories; and while copper production in the last twenty years has
increased a good fifty per cent, aluminum production has increased
during the same period 316 per cent. Everything from typewriter
frames to airplanes, from cooking vessels to furniture, can now be
made of aluminum and its stronger alloys. With aluminum, a new
standard of lightness is set: a dead weight is lifted from all forms of
locomotion, and the new aluminum cars for railroads can attain a
higher speed with a smaller output of power. If one of the great
achievements of the paleotechnic period was the translation of
clumsy wooden machines into stronger and more accurate iron
ones, one of the chief tasks of the neotechnic period is to translate

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 231

heavy iron forms into lighter aluminum ones. And just as the tech-
nique of water-power and electricity had an effect in reorganizmg
even the coal-consumption and steam-production of power plants,
so the lightness of aluminum is a challenge to more careful and more
accurate design in such machines and utilities as still use iron and
steel. The gross over-sizing of standard dimensions, with an excessive
factor of safety based upon a judicious allowance for ignorance, is
intolerable in the finer design of airplanes; and the calculations of
the airplane engineer must in the end react back upon the design of
bridges, cranes, steel-buildings: in fact, such a reaction is already
in evidence. Instead of bigness and heaviness being a happy distinc-
tion, these qualities are now recognized as handicaps: lightness and
compactness are the emergent qualities of the neotechnic era.

The use of the rare metals and the metallic earths is another char-
acteristic advance of this phase: tantalum, tungsten, thorium, and
cerium in lamps, iridium and platinum in mechanical contact points
— ^the tips of foimtain pens or the attachments in removable den-
tures — and of nickel, vanadium, tungsten, manganese and chromium
in steel. Selenium, whose electrical resistance varies inversely with
the intensity of light, was another metal which sprang into wide use
with electricity: automatic counting devices and electric door-openers
are both possible by reason of this physical property.

As a result of systematic experiment in metallurgy a revolution
took place here comparable to that which was involved in the change
from the steam-engine to the dynamo. P'or the rare metals now have
a special place in iadustry, and their careful use tends to promote
habits of thrift even in the exploitation of the commoner minerals.
Thus the production of rustless steel will decrease the erosion of
steel and add to the metal worth redeeming from the scrapheap.
Already the supply of steel is so large and its conservation has
at last become so important that over half the burden of the open
hearth furnaces in the United States is scrap metal — and the open
hearth process now takes care of 80 per cent of the domestic steel
production. The rare elements, most of which were undiscovered
until the nineteenth century, cease to be curiosities or to have, like
gold, chiefly a decorative or honorific value: their importance is

232 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

out of all proportion to their bulk. The significance of minute quan-
tities^ — ^which we shall note again in physiology and medicine — is
characteristic of the entire metallurgy and technics of the new phase.
One might say, for dramatic emphasis, that paleotechnics regarded
only the figures to the left of the decimal, whereas neotechnics is pre-
occupied with those to the right.

There is still another important consequence of this new complex.
While certain products of the neotechnic phase, like glass, copper,
and aluminum, exist like iron in great quantities, there are other
important materials — asbestos, mica, cobalt, radium, uranium,
thorium, helium, cerium, molybdenum, tungsten — ^which are exceed-
ingly rare, or which are strictly limited in their distribution. Mica,
for example, has unique properties that make it indispensable in
the electrical industry: its regular cleavage, great flexibility, elas-
ticity, transparency, non-conductivity of heat and electricity and gen-
eral resistance to decomposition make it the best possible material
for radio condensers, magnetos, spark plugs, and other necessary
instruments; but while it has a fairly wide distribution there are im-
portant parts of the earth that are completely without it. Manganese,
one of the most important alloys for hard steel, is concentrated chiefly
in India, Russia, Brazil and the Gold Coast of Africa. With tungsten,
seventy per cent of the supply comes from South America and 9.3
per cent from the United States; as for chromite, almost half the
present supply comes from South Rhodesia, 12.6 per cent from New
Caledonia, and 10.2 per cent from India. The rubber supply, simi-
larly, is still limited to certain tropical or sub-tropical areas, notably
Brazil and the Malayan archipelago.

Note the importance of these facts in the scheme of world com-
modity flow. Both eotechnic and paleotechnic industry could be car-
ried on within the framework of European society: England, Ger-
many, France, the leading countries, had a sufficient supply of wind,
wood, water, limestone, coal, iron ore; so did the United States.
Under the neotechnic regime their independence and their self-
sufficiency are gone. They must either organize and safeguard and
conserve a worldwide basis of supply, or run the risk of going desti-
tute and relapse into a lower and cruder technology. The basis of

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 233

the material elements in the new industry is neither national nor
continental but planetary: this is equally true, of course, of its tech-
nological and scientific heritage. A laboratory in Tokio or Calcutta
may produce a theory or an invention which will entirely alter the
possibilities of life for a fishing community in Norway. Under these
conditions, no country and no continent can surround itself with a
wall without wrecking the essential, international basis of its tech-
nology: so if the neotechnic economy is to survive, it has no other
alternative than to organize industry and its polity on a worldwide
scale. Isolation and national hostilities are forms of deliberate
technological suicide. The geographical distribution of the rare earths
and metals by itself almost establishes that fact.

One of the greatest of neotechnic advances is associated with the
chemical utilization of coal. Coal tar, once the unfortunate refuse of
the paleotechnic type of beehive coke oven, became an important
source of wealth: from each ton of coal “the by-product oven produces
approximately 1500 pounds of coke, 111,360 cubic feet of gas, 12
gallons of tar, 25 pounds of ammonium sulphate, and 4 gallons of
light oils.” Through the breakdown of coal tar itself the chemist has
produced a host of new medicines, dyes, resins, and even perfumes.
As with advances in mechanization, it has tended to provide greater
freedom from local conditions, from the accidents of supply and the
caprices of nature: though a plague in silkworms might reduce the
output of natural silk, artificial silk, which was first successfully
created in the eighties, could partly take its place.

But while chemistry set itself the task of imitating or reconstruct-
ing the organic — ironically its first great triumph was Wohler’s pro-
duction of urea in 1825 — certain organic compounds for the first
time became important in industry: so that one cannot without severe
qualification accept Sombart’s characterization of modern industry
as the supplanting of organic materials with inorganic ones. The
greatest of these natural products was rubber, out of which the In-
dians of the Amazon had, by the sixteenth century, created shoes,
clothes, and hot water bottles, to say nothing of balls and syringes.
The development of rubber is exactly contemporary to that of elec-
tricity, even as cotton in Western Europe exactly parallels the steam

234 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

engine, for it was Faraday’s isolation of benzine, and the later use
of naphtha, that made its manufacture possible elsewhere than at
its place of origin. The manifold uses of rubber, for insulation,
for phonograph records, for tires, for soles and heels of shoes, for
rainproof clothing, for hygienic accessories, for the surgeon’s gloves,
for balls used in play give it a unique place in modem life. Its
elasticity and impermeability and its insulating qualities make it a
valuable substitute, on occasion, for fibre, metal, and glass, despite
its low melting point. Rubber constitutes one of the great capital
stocks of industry, and reclaimed rubber, according to Zimmerman,
formed from 35 to 51 per cent of the total rubber production in the
United States between 1925 and 1930. The use of com and cane
stalks for composite building materials and for paper illustrates
another principle: the attempt to live on current energy income,
instead of on capital in the form of trees and mineral deposits.

Almost all these new applications date since 1850; most of them
came after 1875; while the great achievements in colloidal chemistry
have come only within our own generation. We owe these materials
and resources quite as much to fine instruments and laboratory
apparatus as we do to power-machinery. Plainly, Marx was in error
when he said that machines told more about the system of produc-
tion that characterized an epoch than its utensils and utilities did:
for it would be impossible to describe the neotechnic phase without
taking into account various triumphs in chemistry and bacteriology
in which machines played but a minor part. Perhaps the most im-
portant single instrument that the later neotechnic period has created
is the three-element oscillator — or amplifier — developed by De For-
est out of the Fleming valve: a piece of apparatus in which the only
moving parts are electric charges. The movement of limbs is more
obvious than the process of osmosis: but they are equally important
in human life; and so too the relatively static operations of chemis-
try are as important to our technology as the more obvious engines
of speed and movement. Today our industry owes a heavy debt to
chemistry: tomorrow it may incur an even heavier debt to physiology
and biology: already, in fact, it begins to be apparent.

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

235

6: Power and Mobility

Only second in importance to the discovery and utilization of
electricity was the improvement that took place in the steam engine
and the internal combustion engine. At the end of the eighteenth
century Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who anticipated so many of the scien-
tific and technical discoveries of the nineteenth century, predicted
that the internal combustion engine would be more useful tlian the
steam engine in solving the problem of flight. Petroleum, which was
known and used by the ancients, and which was exploited in America
as a quack Indian medicine, was tapped by drilling wells, for the
first time in the modern period, in 1859: after that it was rapidly
exploited. The value of the lighter distillates as fuels was equalled
only by that of the heavier oils as lubricants.

From the eighteenth century onward the gas engine was the subject
of numerous experiments: even the use of powdered explosives, on
the analogy of cannon-fire, was tried; and the gas engine was finally
perfected by Otto in 1876. With the improvement of the internal com-
bustion engine a vast new source of power was opened up, fully
equal to the old coal beds in importance, even if doomed to be
consumed at a possibly more rapid rate. But the main point about
fuel oil (used by the later Diesel engine) and gasoline was their
relative lightness and transportability. Not merely could they be
conveyed from well to market by permanent pipe-lines but, since
they were liquids, and since the vaporizations and combustion of
the fuel left little residue in comparison with coal, they could be
stowed away easily, in odds and ends of space where coal could not
be placed or reached: being fed by gravity or pressure the engine
had no need for a stoker.

The eflEect of introducing liquid fuel and of mechanical stokers
for coal, in electric power plants, and on steamships, was to emanci-
pate a race of galley slaves, the stokers, those miserable driven men
whose cruel work Eugene O’Neill properly took as the symbol of
proletarian oppression in his drama. The Hairy Ape. Meanwhile,
the efficiency of the steam engine was raised: the invention of Par
son’s steam turbine in 1884 increased the efficiency of the steam

236

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

engine from ten or twelve for the old reciprocating engine to a good
thirty per cent for the turbine, and the later use of mercury vapor
instead of steam in turbines raised this to 41.5 per cent. How rapid
was the advance in efficiency may be gauged from the average con-
sumption of coal in power stations: it dropped from 3.2 pounds per
kilowatt hour in 1913 to 1.34 pounds in 1928. These improvements
made possible the electrification of railroads even where cheap
water power could not be secured.

The steam engine and the internal combustion engine raced neck
and neck: in 1892, by utilizing a more scientific mode of combus-
tion, through the compression of air alone, Diesel invented an im-
proved type of oil engine which has been built in units as large as
15,000 brake-horsepower, as in the generating plant at Hamburg.
The development of the smaller internal combustion engine during
the eighties and nineties was equally important for the perfection of
the automobile and the airplane.

Neotechnic transportation awaited this new form of power, in
which all the weight should be represented by the fuel itself, instead
of carrying, like the steam engine, the additional burden of water.
With the new automobile, power and movement were no longer
chained to the railroad line; a single vehicle could travel as fast
as a train of cars: again the smaller unit was as efficient as the
larger one. (I put aside the technical question as to whether, with
oil as fuel, the steam engine might not have competed effectively
with the internal combustion engine, and whether it may not, in an
improved and simplified form, re-enter the field.)

The social effects of the automobile and the airplane did not begin
to show themselves on any broad scale until around 1910: the flight
of Bleriot across the English channel in 1909 and the introduction
of the cheap, mass-produced motor car by Henry Ford were signifi-
cant turning points.

But what happened here, unfortunately, is what happened in
almost every department of industrial life. The new machines fol-
lowed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid down by previous
economic and technical structures. While the new motor car was
called a horseless carriage it had no other point of resemblance than

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 237

the fact that it ran on wheels: it was a high-powered locomotive,
equivalent to from five to a hundred horses in power, capable of safe
speeds up to sixty miles an hour, as soon as the cord tire was in-
vented, and having a daily cruising radius of two to three hundred
miles. This private locomotive was set to running on the old-fashioned
dirt roads or macadam highways that had been designed for the
horse and wagon; and though after 1910 these highways were wid-
ened and concrete took the place of lighter materials for the surface,
the pattern of the transportation lines remained what it had been
in the past. All the mistakes that had been made in the railroad build-
ing period were made again with this new type of locomotive.
Main highways cut through the center of towns, despite the conges-
tion, the friction, the noise, and the dangers that attended this old
paleotechnic practice. Treating the motor car solely as a mechanical
object, its introducers made no attempt to introduce appropriate
utilities which would realize its potential benefits.

Had anyone asked in cold blood — as Professor Morris Cohen
has suggested — ^whether this new form of transportation would be
worth the yearly sacrifice of 30,000 lives in the United States alone,
to say nothing of the injured and the maimed, the answer would
doubtless have been No. But the motor car was pumped onto the
market at an accelerating rate, by business men and industrialists
who looked for improvements only in the mechanical realm, and who
had no flair for inventions on any other plane. Mr. Benton MacKaye
has demonstrated that fast transportation, safe transportation and
pedestrian movement, and sound community building are parts of
a single process: the motor car demanded for long distance trans-
portation the Townless Highway, with stations for entrance and exit
at regular intervals and with overpasses and underpasses for major
cross traflSic arteries: similarly, for local transportation, it demanded
the Highwayless Town, in which no neighborhood community would
be split apart by major arteries or invaded by the noise of through
traffic.

Even irom the standpoint of speed by itself, the solution does
not rest solely with the automotive engineer. A car capable of
fifty miles an hour on a well-planned road system is a faster car than

238

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
one that can do a hundred miles an hour, caught in the muddle and
congestion of an old-fashioned highway net, and so reduced to
twenty miles per hour. The rating of a car at the factory, in terms
of speed and horsepower, has very little to do with its actual ef-
ficiency: in short, the motor car is as inefficient without its appro-
priate utilities as the electric power plant would he if the conducting
units were iron wire rather than copper. Developed by a society so
preoccupied with purely mechanical problems and purely mechanical
solutions — ^themselves determined largely by speed in achieving
financial rewards to the investing classes — ^the motor car has never
attained anything like its potential efiSciency except here and there
in the remoter rural regions. Cheapness and quantity production,
combined with the extravagant re-building of old-fashioned highway
systems — with here and there honorable exceptions, as in New Jersey,
Michigan and Westchester County, New York — ^have only increased
the inefficiency of motor cars in use. The losses from congestion, both
in the crowded and hopelessly entangled metropolises, and along
the roads by means of which people attempt to escape the cities on
holidays, are incalculably large in countries which, like the United
States and England, have taken over the motor car most heedlessly
and complacently.

This weakness in the development of neotechnic transportation has
come out during the last generation in still another relationship : the
geographic distribution of the population. Both the motor car and
the airplane have a special advantage over the ordinary steam loco-
motives: the second can fly over areas that are impassable to any
other mode of transportation, and the first can take easily grades
which are prohibitive to the ordinary steam locomotive. By means of
the motor car the upland areas, where electric power can be cheaply
produced, and where the railroad enters at a considerable disadvan-
tage can be thrown open to commerce, industry, and population.
These uplands are likewise often the most salubrious seat of living,
with their fine scenery, their bracing ionized air, their range of
recreation, from mountain-climbing and fishing to swimming and
ice-skating. Here is, I must emphasize, the special habitat of the
neotechnic civilization, as the low coastal areas were for the eotechnic

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 239

phase, and the valley bottoms and coal beds were for the paleotechnic
period. Population nevertheless, instead of being released into these
new centers of living, has continued m many countries to flow into the
metropolitan centers of industry and finance: the motor car served
to facilitate this congestion instead of dispelling it. In addition,
because of the very spread of the overgrown centers the fl 3 dng fields
could be placed only at the extreme outskirts of the higger cities, on
such remaining land as had not been built upon or chopped into
suburban subdivisions: so that the saving in time through the swift-
ness and short-cuts of airplane travel is often counter-balanced, on
short flights, by the length of time it takes to reach the center of the
hig city from the flying fields on the outskirts.

7: The Paradox of Communication

Communication between human beings begins with the immediate
physiological expressions of personal contact, from the bowlings and
cooings and head-turnings of the infant to the more abstract gestures
and signs and sounds out of which language, in its fulness, develops.
With hieroglyphics, painting, drawing, the written alphabet, there
grew up during the historic period a series of abstract forms of
expression which deepened and made more reflective and pregnant
the intercourse of men. The lapse of time between expression and
reception had something of the effect that the arrest of action pro-
duced in making thought itself possible.

With the invention of the telegraph a series of inventions began
to bridge the gap in time between communication and response de-
spite the handicaps of space: first the telegraph, then the telephone,
then the wireless telegraph, then the wireless telephone, and finally
television. As a result, communication is now on the point of return-
ing, with the aid of mechanical devices, to that instantaneous reaction
of person to person with which it began; but the possibilities of this
immediate meeting, instead of being limited by space and time, will
be limited only by the amount of energy available and the mechanical
perfection and accessibility of the apparatus. When the radio tele-
phone is supplemented by television communication will differ from
direct intercourse only to the extent that immediate physical con-

240 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tact will be impossible: the hand of sympathy will not actually grasp

the recipient’s hand, nor the raised fist fall upon the provoking head.

What will be the outcome? Obviously, a widened range of inter-
course: more numerous contacts: more numerous demands on atten-
tion and time. But unfortunately, the possibility of this type of
immediate intercourse on a worldwide basis does not necessarily
mean a less trivial or a less parochial personality. For over against
the convenience of instantaneous communication is the fact that the
great economical abstractions of writing, reading, and drawing, the
media of reflective thought and deliberate action, will be weakened.
Men often tend to be more socialized at a distance, than they are in
their immediate, limited, and local selves: their intercourse some-
times proceeds best, like barter among savage peoples, when neither
group is visible to the other. That the breadth and too-frequent repeti-
tion of personal intercourse may be socially ineflSicient is already
plain through the abuse of the telephone: a dozen five minute con-
versations can frequently be reduced in essentials to a dozen notes
whose reading, writing, and answering takes less time and effort
and nervous energy than the more personal calls. With the telephone
the flow of interest and attention, instead of being self-directed, is at
the mercy of any strange person who seeks to divert it to his own
purposes.

One is faced here with a magnified form of a danger common to
all inventions: a tendency to use them whether or not the occasion
demands. Thus our forefathers used iron sheets for the fronts of
buildings, despite the fact that iron is a notorious conductor of heat:
thus people gave up learning the violin, the guitar, and the piano
when the phonograph was introduced, despite the fact that the passive
listening to records is not in the slightest degree the equivalent of
active performance; thus the introduction of anesthetics increased
fatalities from superfluous operations. The lifting of restrictions upon
close human intercourse has been, in its first stages, as dangerous as
the flow of populations into new lands: it has increased the areas
of friction. Similarly, it has mobilized and hastened mass-reactions,
like those which occur on the eve of a war, and it has increased the
dangers of international conflict. To ignore these facts would be to

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 241

paint a very falsely over-optimistic picture of the present economy.

Nevertheless, instantaneous personal communication over long
distances is one of the outstanding marks of the neotechnic phase:
it is the mechanical symbol of those world-wide cooperations of
thought and feeling which must emerge, finally, if our whole civiliza-
tion is not to sink into ruin. The new avenues of communication have
the characteristic features and advantages of the new technics; for
they imply, among other things, the use of mechanical apparatus to
duplicate and further organic operations: in the long run, they
promise not to displace the human being but to re-focus him and
enlarge his capacities. But there is a proviso attached to this promise:
namely, that the culture of the personality shall parallel in refine-
ment the mechanical development of the machine. Perhaps the great-
est social effect of radio-communication, so far, has been a political
one: the restoration of direct contact between the leader and the
group. Plato defined the limits of the size of a city as the number
of people who could hear the voice of a single orator: today those
limits do not define a city but a civilization. Wherever neotechnic
instruments exist and a common language is used there are now the
elements of almost as close a political unity as that which once was
possible in the tiniest cities of Attica. The possibilities for good and
evil here are immense: the secondary personal contact with voice and
image may increase the amount of mass regimentation, all the more
because the opportunity for individual members reacting directly
upon the leader himself, as in a local meeting, becomes farther and
farther removed. At the present moment, as witli so many other neo-
technic benefits, the dangers of the radio and the talking picture seem
greater than the benefits. As with all instruments of multiplication the
critical question is as to the function and quality of the object one is
multiplying. There is no satisfactory answer to this on the basis of
technics alone; certainly nothing to indicate, as the earlier exponents
of instantaneous communication seem pretty uniformly to have
thought, that the results will automatically be favorable to the com-
munity.

242

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

8: The New Permanent Record

Man’s culture depends for its transmission in time upon the per-
ment record: the building, the monument, the inscribed word. During
the early neotechnic phase, vast changes were made here, as im-
portant as those brought about five hundred years earlier through
the invention of wood-engraving, copper-etching, and printing. The
black-and-white image, the color-image, the sound, and the moving
image were translated into permanent records, which could be
manifolded, by mechanical and chemical means. In the invention
of the camera, the phonograph, and the moving picture the interplay
of science and mechanical dexterity, which has already been stressed,
was again manifested.

"While all these new forms of permanent record were first em-
ployed chiefly for amusement, and while the interest behind them
was esthetic rather than narrowly utilitarian, they had important uses
in science, and they even reacted upon our conceptual world as
well. The photograph, to begin with, served as an independent objec-
tive check upon observation. The value of a scientific experiment
lies partly in the fact that it is repeatable and thus verifiable by inde-
pendent observers: but in the case of astronomical observations, for
example, the slowness and fallibility of the eye can be supplemented
by the camera, and the photograph gives the effect of repetition to
what was, perhaps, a unique event, never to be observed again. In
the same fashion, the camera gives an almost instantaneous cross-
section of history — arresting images in their flight through time. In
the case of architecture this mechanical copying on paper led to
unfortunately similar artifices in actual buildings, and instead of
enriching the mind left a trail of arrested images in the form of
buildings all over the landscape. For history is non-repeatable, and
the only thing that can be rescued from history is the note that one
takes and preserves at some moment of its evolution. To divorce an
object from its integral time-sequence is to rob it of its complete
meaning, although it makes it possible to grasp spatial relations
which may otherwise defy observation. Indeed, the very value of
the camera as a reproducing device is to present a memorandum,

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 243

as it were, of that which cannot in any other fashion be reproduced.

In a world of flux and change, the camera gave a means of com-
bating the ordinary processes of deterioration and decay, not by
“restoration” or “reproduction” but by holding in convenient form
the lean image of men, places, buildings, landscapes: thus serving as
an extension of the collective memory. The moving picture, carrying
a succession of images through time, widened the scope of the camera
and essentially altered its function; for it could telescope the slow
movement of growth, or prolong the fast movement of jumping, and
it could keep in steady focus events which could not otherwise be held
in consciousness with the same intensity and fixity. Heretofore rec-
ords had been confined to snatches of time, or, when they sought to
move with time itself, they were reduced to abstractions. Now they
could become continuous images of the events they represented. So
the flow of time ceased to be representable by the successive mechani-
cal ticks of the clock: its equivalent — and Bergson was quick to seize
this image — ^was the motion picture reel.

One may perhaps over-rate the changes in human behavior that
followed the invention of these new devices; but one or two suggest
themselves. Whereas in the eotechnic phase one conversed with the
mirror and produced the biographical portrait and the introspective
biography, in the neotechnic phase one poses for the camera, or
still more, one acts for the motion picture. The change is from an
introspective to a behaviorist psychology, from the fulsome sorrows
of Werther to the impassive public mask of an Ernest Hemingway.
Facing hunger and death in the midst of a wilderness, a stranded
aviator writes in his notes: “I built another raft, and this time took
off my clothes to try it. I must have looked good, carrying the big
logs on my back in my underwear.” Alone, he still thinks of himself
as a public character, being watched: and to a greater or less degree
everyone, from the crone in a remote hamlet to the political dictator
on his carefully prepared stage is in the same position. This constant
sense of a public world would seem in part, at least, to be the result
of the camera and the camera-eye that developed with it. If the eye
be absent in reality, one improvises it wryly with a fragment of
one’s consciousness. The change is significant: not self-examination

244 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

but self-exposure: not tortured confession but easy open candor: not
the proud soul wrapped in his cloak, pacing the lonely beach at mid-
night, but the matter-of-fact soul, naked, exposed to the sun on the
beach at noonday, one of a crowd of naked people. Such reactions are,
of course, outside the realm of proof; and even if the influence of the
camera were directly demonstrable, there is little reason to think
that it is final. Need I stress again that nothing produced by technics
is more final than the human needs and interests themselves that have
created technics?

Whatever the psychal reactions to the camera and the moving
picture and the phonograph may be, there is no doubt, I think, as
to their contribution to the economic management of the social heri-
tage. Before they appeared, sound could only be imperfectly repre-
sented in the conventions of writing: it is interesting to note that one
of the best systems, Bell’s Visible Speech, was invented by the father
of the man who created the telephone. Other than written and printed
documents and paintings on paper, parchment, and canvas, nothing
survived of a civilization except its rubbish heaps and its monu-
ments, buildings, sculptures, works of engineering — all bulky, all
interfering more or less with the free development of a different life
in the same place.

By means of the new devices this vast mass of physical impedi-
menta could be turned into paper leaves, metallic or rubber discs,
or celluloid films which could be far more completely and far more
economically preserved. It is no longer necessary to keep vast mid-
dens of material in order to have contact, in the mind, with the forms
and expressions of die past. These mechanical devices are thus an
excellent ally to that other new piece of social apparatus which
became common in the nineteenth century: the public museum.
They gave modem civilization a direct sense of the past and a more
accurate perception of its memorials than any other civilization had,
in all probability, had. Not alone did they make the past more
immediate: they made the present more historic by narrowing the
lapse of time between the actual events themselves and their con-
crete record. For the first time one might come face to face with
the speaking likenesses of dead people and recall in their immediacy

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

245

forgotten scenes and actions. Faust bartered his soul with Mephis-
topheles to see Helen of Troy: on much easier terms it will be
possible for our descendants to view the Helens of the twentieth
century. Thus a new form of immortality was effected; and a late
Victorian writer, Samuel Butler, might well speculate upon how com-
pletely a man was dead when his words, his image, and his voice
were still capable of being resurrected and could have a direct effect
upon the spectator and listener.

At first these new recording and reproducing devices have con-
fused the mind and defied selective use: no one can pretend that we
have yet employed them, in any sufficient degree, with wisdom or
even with ordered efficiency. But they suggest a new relationship
between deed and record, between the movement of life and its col-
lective enregistration: above all, they demand a nicer sensitiveness
and a higher intelligence. If these inventions have so far made
monkeys of us, it is because we are still monkeys.

9: Light and Life

Light shines on every part of the neotechnic world: it filters
through solid objects, it penetrates fog, it glances back from the
polished surfaces of mirrors and electrodes. And with light, color
comes back and the shape of things, once hidden in fog and smoke,
becomes sharp as crystal. The glass technics, which had reached its
first summit of mechanical perfection in the Venetian mirror, now
repeats its triumphs in a hundred different departments: quartz alone
is its rival.

In the neotechnic phase the telescope and above all the microscope
assume a new importance, for the latter had been left in practical
disuse for two centuries, but for the extraordinary work of a
Leeuwenhoek and a Spallanzani. To these instruments must be added
the spectroscope and the x-ray tube which also utilized light as an
instrument of exploration. Clerk-Maxwell’s unification of electricity
and light is perhaps the outstanding symbol of this new phase. The
fine discrimination of color exhibited by Monet and his fellow im-
pressionists, working in the open air and the sunlight was repeated
in the laboratory: spectrum analysis and the production of a multi-

246

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tude of aniline dyes derived from coal tar conservation are specifi-
cally neotechnic achievements. Now color, hitherto relegated to an
unimportant place as a secondary characteristic of matter, becomes
an important factor in chemical analysis, with the discovery that
each element has its characteristic spectrum. The new dyes, more-
over, find their use in the bacteriologist’s laboratory for staining
specimens: some of them, like gentian violet, have a place as anti-
septics, and still others as medicaments in the treatment of certain
diseases.

The dark blind world of the machine, the miner’s world, began to
disappear: heat, light, electricity, and finally matter were all mani-
festations of energy, and as one pursued the analysis of matter
further the old solids became more and more tenuous, until finally
they were identified with electric charges: the ultimate building
stones of modern physics, as the atom was of the older physical
theories. The imperceptible, the ultra-violet and the infra-red series
of rays, became commonplace elements in the new physical world
at the moment that the dark forces of the unconscious were added
to the purely external and rationalized psychology of the human
world. Even the unseen was, so to say, illuminated: it was no longer
unknown. One might measure and use what one could not see and
handle. And while the paleotechnic world had used physical blows
and flame to transform matter, the neotechnic was conscious of other
forces equally potent trader other circumstances: electricity, sound,
light, invisible rays and emanations. The mystic’s belief in a human
aura became as well substantiated by exact science as the alchemist’s
dream of transmutation was through the Curies’ isolation of radium.

The cult of the sim, so dear to Kepler at the beginning of these
revolutionary scientific developments, emerged again: the exposure
of the naked body to the sun helped, it was found, to prevent rickets
and to cure tuberculosis, while direct sunlight sanitated water and
reduced the number of pathogenic bacteria in the environment gen-
erally. With this new knowledge, founded upon that renewed study
of the organism which Pasteur’s discoveries promoted, the essentially
anti-vital nature of the paleotechnic environment became plain: the
darkness and dampness of its typical mines and factories and slum

THE NEOTECHNIG PHASE

247

homes were ideal conditions for breeding bacteria, while its devital-
ized diet resulted in a poor bony structure, defective teeth and weak-
ened resistance to disease. The full effects of these conditions were
amply documented in the examinations for recruits in the British
army toward the end of the century: results which came out with
special clearness because of the predominant urbanization of Eng-
land. But the Massachusetts mortality tables told the same story: the
farmer’s length of life was far greater than the industrial worker’s.
Thanks to neotechnic inventions and discoveries the machine became,
for perhaps the first time, a direct ally of life: and in the light of
this new knowledge its previous misdemeanors became more gro-
tesque and incredible.

Mathematical accuracy, physical economy, chemical purity, surgi-
cal cleanliness — ^these are some of the attributes of the new regime.
And mark this: they do not belong to any one department of life.
Mathematical accuracy is necessary in the temperature chart or the
blood count, while cleanliness becomes part of the daily ritual of
neotechnic society with a strictness quite as great as that enforced
by the tabus of the earlier religions like the Jewish or the Moham-
medan. The polished copper of the electric radiator is reflected in
the immaculacy of the operating room: the wide glass windows of
the sanitorium are repeated in the factory, the school, the home.
During the last decade, in the finer communities that have been built
with State aid in Europe the houses themselves are positively helio-
tropic: they are oriented to the sun.

This new technics does not stop short with mechanical inventions:
it begins to call to its aid the biological and psychological sciences,
and the studies of working efiiciency and fatigue, for example, estab-
lish the fact that to curtail the hours of work may be to increase the
volume of production per unit. The prevention of disease, the sub-
stitution of hygiene for belated repair, becomes a characteristic of
neotechnic medicine: a return to Nature, a new confidence in the
organism as a harmonious, self -equilibrating unit. Under the leader-
ship of Osier and his school, the physician relies upon the natural
curative agents: water, diet, sun, air, recreation, massage, change
of scene: in short, upon a balanced and life-enhancing environ-

248 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

ment and upon functional readjustment, rather than upon more
foreign chemical and mechanical aids without such conditions. Here
again the intuition of Hahnemann as to the role of minute quantities
and the natural therapeutics of his school, anticipated by over a cen-
tury the new regimen — as Osier himself handsomely acknowledged.
The psychological treatment of functional disorders, which made its
way into medicine with Freud a generation ago almost completes
this new orientation: the social element is alone still largely lacking.
As a result of all these advances, one of the major problems for the
new technics becomes the removal of the blighted paleotechnic envi-
ronment, and the re-education of its victims to a more vital regimen
of working and living. The dirty crowded houses, the dank airless
courts and alleys, the bleak pavements, the sulphurous atmosphere,
the over-routinized and dehumanized factory, the drill schools, the
second-hand experiences, the starvation of the senses, the remoteness
from nature and animal activity — ^here are the enemies. The living
organism demands a life-sustaining environment. So far from seeking
to replace this by mechanical substitutes, the neotechnic phase seeks
to establish such life-sustaining conditions within the innermost pur-
lieus of technics itself.

The paleotechnic phase was ushered in by a slaughter of the
innocents: first in the cradle, and then, if they survived it, in the
textile factories and the mines. Child labor remained in the cotton
mills in the United States, for example, right down to 1933. As a
result of greater care during pregnancy and childbirth, together with
a better regimen in infancy, the mortality of children under five years
has been enormously decreased — ^all the more because certain typical
children’s diseases are, through modern immunology, under better
control. This increasing care of life has spread slowly to the occupa-
tions. of maturity: mark the introduction of safety devices in
dangerous industrial operations, such as masks in grinding and
spraying, asbestos and mica clothing where the dangers of fire and
heat are great, the effort to abolish lead glazes in pottery, to eliminate
phosphorous poisoning in the preparation of matches and radium
poisoning in the preparation of watch-dials. These negative measures
toward health are, of course, but a beginning: the positive fostering

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 249

of the life-conserving occupations and the discouragement of those
forms of industry which decrease the expectation of life without any
compensatory intensification of it during production — all this awaits
a culture more deeply concerned with life than even the neotechnic
one, in which the calculus of energies still takes precedence over
the calculus of life.

In surgery likewise neotechnic methods supplement the cruder
mechanics of the mid-nineteenth century. There is a large gap be-
tween the antiseptic methods of Lister, with his reliance upon that
typical coal-tar antiseptic, carbolic acid, and the aseptic technique
of modem surgery, first introduced before Lister in operations upon
the eye. The use of the x-ray and the tiny electric bulb for explora-
tion, for example, combined with systematic checks provided by
the bacteriological laboratory, have increased the possibility of intel-
ligent diagnosis by other means than that offered by the knife.

With prevention rather than cure, and health rather than disease,
as the focal points of the new medicine, the psychological side of the
mind-body process becomes increasingly the object of scientific in-
vestigation. The Descartian notion of a mechanical body presided
over by an independent entity called the soul is replaced, as the
“matter” of theoretical physics becomes more attenuated, by the
notion of the transformation within the organism of mind-states into
body-states, and vice-versa. The dualism of the dead mechanical
body, belonging to the world of matter, and the vital transcendental
soul, belonging to the spiritual realm, disappears before the increas-
ing insight, derived from physiology on one hand and the investiga-
tion of neuroses on the other, of a dynamic interpenetration and
conversion within the boundaries of organic structures and fumctions.
Now the physical and the psychal become different aspects of the
organic process, in much the same way that heat and light are both
aspects of energy, differentiated only by the situation to which they
refer and by the particular set of receptors upon which they act. This
development lays the specialization and isolation of functions, upon
which so many mechanical operations are based, open to suspicion.
The integral life of the organism is not compatible with extreme
isolation of functions: even mechanical efficiency is seriously affected

250 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

by sexual anxiety and lack of animal health. The fact that simple
repetitive operations agree with the psychological constitution of the
feeble-minded constitutes a warning as to the limits of sub-divided
labor. Mass production tmder conditions which confirm these limits
may exact too high a human price for its cheap products. What is not
mechanical enough for a machine to perform may not be human
enough for a living man. EfiSciency must begin with the utilization
of the whole man; and efforts to increase mechanical performance
must cease when the balance of the whole man is threatened.

10: The Influence of Biology

In the earlier chapters, we observed that the first step toward mech-
anism consisted in a cmmter-movement to life: the substitution of
mechanically measured time for duration, of mechanical prime
movers for the human body, of drill and regimentation for spon-
taneous impulses and more cooperative modes of association. During
the neotechnic phase this animus was profoundly modified. The inves-
tigation of the world of life opened up new possibilities for the
machine itself: vital interests, ancient human wishes, influenced the
development of new inventions. Flight, telephonic communication, the
phonograph, the motion picture all arose out of the more scientific
study of living organisms. The studies of the physiologist supple-
mented those of the physicist.

The belief in mechanical flight grew directly out of the researches
of the physiological laboratory. After Leonardo the only scientific
study of flight, up to the work of J. B. Pettigrew and E. J. Marey in
the eighteen-sixties, was that of the physiologist, Borelli, whose De
Motu Animalium was published in 1680. Pettigrew, an Edinburgh
pathologist, made a detailed study of locomotion in animals, in which
he demonstrated that walking, swimming, and flying are in reality
only modifications of each other: “the wing,” he found, “both when
at rest and when in motion, may not inaptly be compared to the
blade of an ordinary screw propeller as employed in navigation”
. . . while “weight . . . instead of being a barrier to artificial
flight, is absolutely necessary to it.” From these investigations Petti-

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 251

grew — and independently Marey — drew the conclusion that human
flight was possible.

In this development, flying models, utilizing the new material
rubber as motive power, played an important part: Penaud in Paris,
Kress in Vienna, and later Langley in the United States utilized them:
but the final touch, necessary for stable flight, came when two bicycle
mechanics, Orville and Wilbur Wright, studied the flight of soaring
birds, like the gull and the hawk, and discovered the function of
warping the tips of the wings to achieve lateral stability. Further
improvements in the design of airplanes have been associated, not
merely with the mechanical perfection of the wings and the motors,
but with the study of the flight of other types of bird, like the duck,
and the movement of fish in water.

Similarly, the moving picture was in essence a combination of
elements derived from the study of living organisms. The first was the
discovery of the basis for the illusion of movement, made by the
physiologist Plateau in his investigation of the after-image. Out
of this work the succession of paper pictures, passed rapidly before
the eye, became a popular child’s toy, the phenakistoscope and the
zoetrope. The next step was the work of the Frenchman, Marey,
in photographing the movements of four-footed animals and of man:
a research which was begun in 1870 and finally projected upon a
screen in 1889. Meanwhile Edward Muybridge, to decide a bet with
Leland Stanford, a horse-lover, undertook to photograph the suc-
cessive motions of a horse — and later followed this with pictures of
an ox, a wild bull, a greyhound, a deer, and birds. In 1887 it oc-
curred to Edison, who was aware of these experiments, to do for the
eye what he had already done for the ear, and the invention of the
motion picture machine followed, an advance which was in turn
dependent upon the invention of the celluloid film in the eighties.

Bell’s telephone owes a similar debt to physiology and to human
play. Von Kempelen had invented a talking automaton which uttered
a few words in 1778. A similar machine, Euphonia, invented by
Professor Faber, was exhibited in London; and the elder Bell per-
suaded Alexander and his brother to make a speaking automaton
themselves. Imitating the tongue and the soft parts of the throat with

252 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

rubber, they made a creditable attempt at a talking machine. Alex-
ander’s grandfather had devoted his life to correcting speech defects:
his father, A. M. Bell, invented a system of visible speech and was
interested in the culture of the voice: he himself was a scientific
student of voice production and made great strides in teaching deaf-
mutes to talk. Out of this physiological knowledge and these humane
interests — aided by Helmholtz’s work in physics — grew the tele-
phone: the receiver of which, upon the advice of a Boston surgeon,
Dr. C. J. Blake, was directly modeled upon the bones and diaphragm
of the human ear.

This interest in living organisms does not stop short with the
specific machines that simulate eye or ear. From the organic world
came an idea utterly foreign to the paleotechnic mind: the import-
ance of shape.

One can grind a diamond or a piece of quartz to powder: though
it has lost its specific crystalline shape, the particles will retain all
their chemical properties and most of their physical ones: they will
still at least be carbon or silicon dioxide. But the organism that
is crushed out of shape is no longer an organism: not merely are its
specific properties of growth, renewal, reproduction absent, but the
very chemical constitution of its parts undergoes a change. Not even
the loosest form of organism, the classic amoeba, can be called a
shapeless mass. The technical importance of shape was unappreciated
throughout the paleotechnic phase: but for the great mechanical
craftsmen, like Maudslay, interest in the esthetic refinement of the
machine was non-existent, or, when it came in, it entered as an
intrusion, as in the addition of Doric or Gothic ornament, between
1830 and 1860. Except for improvements in specifically eotechnic
apparatus, like the clipper sailing ship, shape was looked upon as
unimportant. As far back as 1874, for example, the stream-lined
locomotive was designed: but the writer in Knight’s Dictionary of
the Mechanical Arts who described it cited the improvement only
to dismiss it. “There is nothing in it,” he said with cool contempt.
Against possible gains in efficiency by merely altering the shape of
a machine, the paleotect put his faith in more power-consumption
and greater size.

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

253

Only witt the development of specifically neotechnic machines,
such as the airplane, with the scientific studies of air-resistance that
followed close on their heels, did shape begin to play a new role
in technics. Machines, which had assumed their own characteristic
shapes in developing independent of organic forms, were now forced
to recognize the superior economy of nature: on actual tests, the
blunt heads of many species of fish and the long tapering tail, proved,
against naive intuition, to be the most economic shape of moving
through air or water; while, in gliding motion over land, the form
of the turtle, developed for walking over a muddy bottom, proved
suggestive to the designer. The utilization of aerodynamic curves
in the design of the body of the airplane — ^to say nothing of the
wings — increases the lifting power without the addition of a single
horsepower: the same principle applied to locomotives and motor
cars, eliminating all points of air resistance, lowers the amount of
power needed and increases the speed. Indeed, with the knowledge
drawn from living forms via the airplane the railroad can now
compete once more on even terms with its successor.

In short, the integral esthetic organization of the machine becomes,
with the neotechnic economy, the final step in ensuring its efficiency.
While the esthetics of the machine is more independent of subjective
factors than the esthetics of a painting, there is a point in the back-
ground at which they both nevertheless meet: for our emotional
responses and our standards of efficiency and beauty are derivable
largely in both cases from our reactions to the world of life, where
correct adaptations of form have so frequently survived. The eye
for form, color, fitness, which the cattle-breeder and horticulturist
hitherto had shared with the artist, now made its way into the machine
shop and the laboratory: one might judge a machine by some of the
criteria one applied to a bull, a bird, an apple. In dentistry the
appreciation of the essential physiological function of natural tooth-
forms altered the entire technique of tooth-restoration: the crude
mechanics and cruder esthetics of an earlier day fell into disrepute.
This new interest in form was a direct challenge to the blind ideology
of the earlier period. One might reverse Emerson’s dictum and say,
in the light of the new technology, that the necessary can never

254 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

divorce itself from the superstructure of the beautiful. I shall return

to this fact again when I discuss the assimilation of the machine.

One more phenomenon must be noted, which binds together the
machine and the world of life in the neotechnic phase: namely, the
respect for minute quantities, imnoticed or invisible before, some-
times below the threshold of consciousness: the part played by the
precious alloys in metallurgy, by tiny quantities of energy in radio
reception, by the hormones in the body, by the vitamines in the diet,
by ultra-violet rays in growth, by die bacteria and liltrable viruses
in disease. Not merely is importance in the neotechnic phase no
longer symbolized by bulk, but the attention to small quantities leads
by habituation to higher standards of refinement in every depart-
ment of activity. Langley’s bolometer can distinguish one one-mil-
lionth of a degree centigrade, against the one one-thousandth possible
on a mercury thermometer: the Tuckerman strain gauge can read
millionths of an inch — ^the deflection of a brick when bent by the
hand — ^while Bose’s high magnification crescograph records the rate
of growth as slow as one one-hundred-thousandth of an inch per
second. Subtlety, finesse, delicacy, respect for organic complexity
and intricacy now characterize the entire range of scientific thought:
this has grown in part out of refinements in technical methods, and
in turn it has furthered them. The change is recorded in every
part of man’s experience: from the increased weight placed by
psychology upon hitherto unnoticed traumas to the replacement of
the pure calory diet, based upon the energy content alone, by the
balanced diet which includes even the infinitesimal amounts of iodine
and copper that are needed for health. In a word, the quantitative and
the mechanical have at last become life-sensitive.

We are still, I must emphasize, probably only at the beginning
of this reverse process, whereby technics, instead of benefiting by
its abstraction from life, will benefit even more greatly by its inte-
gration with it. Already important developments are on the horizon.
Two instances must sufllce. In 1919 Harvey studied the production of
heat during the luminescence of the appropriate substance derived
from the crustacean, Cyrpoidina hilgendorfi. He found that the rise
of temperature during the luminescent reaction is less than 0.001

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 255

degree centigrade, and probably less than 0.0005 degrees. The chem-
ical constituents from which this cold light is made are now known:
luciferin and luciferase; and the possibility of synthesizing them
and manufacturing them, now theoretically within our grasp, would
increase the efiSciency of lighting far above anything now possible
in the utilization of electricity. The organic production of electricity
in certain fishes may likewise furnish a clue to the invention of
economic high-powered electric cells — in which case the electric
motor, which neither devitalizes nor defiles nor overheats the air
would have a new part to play, probably, in all forms of locomotion.
Developments like these, which are plainly imminent, point to im-
provements in technics which will make our present crude utilization
of horsepower seem even more wasteful than the practices of paleo-
technic engineering do to the designer of a modern power station.

11: From Destruction to Conservation

The paleotechnic period, we have noted, was marked by the reck-
less waste of resources. Hot in the pursuit of immediate profits, the
new exploiters gave no heed to the environment around them, nor to
the further consequences of their actions on the morrow. “What had
posterity done for them?” In their haste, they over-reached them-
selves: they threw money into the rivers, let it escape in smoke in
the air, handicapped themselves with their own litter and filth, pre-
maturely exhausted the agricultural lands upon which they depended
for food and fabrics.

Against all these wastes the neotechnic phase, with its richer
chemical and biological knowledge, sets its face. It tends to replace
the reckless mining habits of the earlier period with a thrifty and
conservative use of the natural environment. Concretely, the con-
servation and utilization of scrap-metals and scrap-rubber and slag
mean a tidying up of the landscape: the end of the paleotechnic
middens. Electricity itself aids in this transformation. The smoke
pall of paleotechnic industry begins to lift: with electricity the clear
sky and the clean waters of the eotechnic phase come back again: the
water that runs through the immaculate disks of the turbine, unlike
the water filled with the washings of the coal seams or the refuse of

256 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the old chemical factories, is just as pure when it emerges. Hydro-
electricity, moreover, gives rise to geotechnics: forest cover protec-
tion, stream control, the building of reservoirs and power dams.

As early as 1866 George Perkins Marsh, in his classic book on
Man and Nature, pointed out the grave dangers of forest destruc-
tion and the soil erosion that followed it: here was waste in its pri-
mary form — ^the waste of the precious skin of arable, humus-filled
soil with which the more favored regions of the world are covered,
a skin that is unreplaceable without centuries of waiting except by
transporting new tissue from some other favored region. The skinning
of the wheat lands and the cotton lands in order to provide cheap
bread and textiles to the manufacturing classes was literally cutting
the ground from under their feet. So strongly entrenched were these
methods that even in America, no effective steps were taken to com-
bat this wastage until a generation after Marsh’s books ; indeed, with
the invention of the wood-pulp process for making paper, the spolia-
tion of the forest went on more rapidly. Timber-mining and soil-
mining proceeded hand in hand.

But during the nineteenth century a series of disastrous experiences
began to call attention to the fact that nature could not be ruthlessly
invaded and the wild life indiscriminately exterminated by man
without bringing upon his head worse evils than he was eliminating.
The ecological investigations of Darwin and the later biologists estab-
lished the concept of the web of life, of that complex interplay of
geological formation, climate, soil, plants, animals, protozoa, and
bacteria which maintains a harmonious adjustment of species to
habitat. To cut down a forest, or to introduce a new species of tree
or insect, might be to set in motion a whole chain of remote conse-
quences. In order to maintain the ecological balance of a region, one
could no longer exploit and exterminate as recklessly as had been
the wont of the pioneer colonist. The region, in short, had some of
the characteristics of an individual organism: like the organism, it
had various methods of meeting maladjustment and maintaining its
balance: but to turn it into a specialized machine for producing a
single kipd of goods — ^wheat, trees, coal — and to forget its many-
sided potentialities as a habitat for organic life was finally to unsettle

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

257

and make precarious the single economic function that seemed so
important.

With respect to the soil itself, the neotechnic phase produced im-
portant conservative changes. One of them was the utilization once
more of human excrement for fertilizers, in contrast with the reckless
method of befouling stream and tidal water and dissipating the
precious nitrogenous compounds. The sewage utilization plants of
neotechnic practice, most extensively and systematically introduced
perhaps in Germany, not merely avoid the misuse of the environ-
ment, but actually enrich it and help bring it to a higher state of
cultivation. The presence of such plants is one of the distinguishing
characteristics of a neotechnic environment. The second important
advance was in the fixation of nitrogen. At the end of the nineteenth
century the existence of agriculture seemed threatened by the ap-
proaching exhaustion of the Chile nitrate beds. Shortly after this
various processes for fixing nitrogen were discovered: the arc process
(1903) required cheap electric power: but the synthetic ammonia
process, introduced by Haber in 1910, gave a new use to the coke
oven. But equally typical of the new technology was the discovering
of the nitrogen-forming bacteria at the root-nodules of certain plants
like pea and clover and soy bean: some of these plants had been used
by the Romans and Chinese for soil regeneration: but now their
specific function in restoring nitrogen was definitely established.
With this discovery one of the paleotechnic nightmares — ^that of
imminent soil-exhaustion — disappeared. These alternative processes
typify another neotechnic fact: namely, that the technical solution it
offers for its problems is not confined necessarily to a physical or
mechanical means: electro-physics offers one solution, chemistry an-
other, bacteriology and plant physiology still a third.

Plainly, the fixation of nitrogen was a far greater contribution to
the efficiency of agriculture than any of the excellent devices that
speeded up the processes of ploughing, harrowing, sowing, cultivat-
ing, or harvesting. Knowledge of this sort — ^like the knowledge of
the desirable shapes for moving bodies — is characteristic of the neo-
technic phase. While on one side neotechnic advances perfect the
automatic machine and extend its operations, on the other, they do

258 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

away with the complications of machinery in provinces where they
are not needed. A field of soy beans may, for certain purposes, take
the place of a transcontinental railroad, a dock in San Francisco, a
port, a railroad, and a mine in Chile, to say nothing of all the labor
involved in bringing these machines and pieces of apparatus together.
This generalization holds true for other realms than agriculture. One
of the first great improvements introduced by Frederick Taylor xmder
the head of scientific management involved only a change in the
motion and routine of unskilled laborers carrying ingots. Similarly,
a better routine of living and a more adequately planned environ-
ment eliminates the need for sim-lamps, mechanical exercisers, con-
stipation remedies, while a knowledge of diet has done away except
as a desperate last resort with once fashionable — and highly dan-
gerous — operations upon the stomach.

’Whereas the growth and multiplication of machines was a definite
characteristic of the paleotechnic period, one may already say pretty
confidently that the refinement, the diminution, and the partial elimi-
nation of the machine is a characteristic of the emerging neotechnic
economy. The shrinkage of the machine to the provinces where its
services are unique and indispensable is a necessary consequence of
our better understanding of the machine itself and the world in which
it functions.

The conservation of the environment has still another neotechnic
aspect: that is the building up in agriculture of an appropriate arti-
ficial environment. Up to the seventeenth century man’s most impor-
tant artifact was probably the city itself: but during this century the
same tactics he had used for his own domestication were applied to
agriculture in the building of glass hothouses, and during the nine-
teenth century, with the increase of glass production and the expand-
ing empirical knowledge of the soils, glass culture became important
in the supply of fruits and vegetables. No longer content with taking
Nature as it comes, the neotechnic agriculturist seeks to determine
the exact conditions of soil, temperature, moisture, insolation that
are needed for the specific crop he would grow. ’Within his cold
frames and his hothouses he brings these conditions into existence.

This deliberate and systematic agriculture is seen at its best today,

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE 259

perhaps, in Holland and Belgium, and in dairy farming as carried
on in Denmark and Wisconsin. Parallel then with the spread of
modem industry throughout the world there is a similar equalization
in agriculture. Aided by the cheap production of glass and metal
frames, to say nothing of synthetic substitutes for glass which will
permit the ultra-violet rays to pass through, there is the prospect of
turning part of agriculture into an all-year occupation, thus diminish-
ing the amount of transportation necessary for fresh fruits and vege-
tables, and even cultivating, under possibly more humane conditions,
the tropical fruits and vegetables. In this new phase, the amount of
soil available is not nearly of such critical importance as its quality
and its manner of use.

The closer inter-planning of rural and urban occupations neces-
sarily follows from the partial industrialization of agriculture. Even
without the use of hothouses the widespread distribution of popula-
tion through the open country is a consequence of neotechnic industry
that is actually in the process of realization: this brings with it the
possibility of adjusting industrial production to seasonal changes of
work enforced by nature in agriculture. And as agriculture becomes
more industrialized, not merely will the extreme rustic and the ex-
treme cockney human types tend to diminish, but the rhythms of
the two occupations will approach each other and modify each other:
if agriculture, freed from the uncertainty of the weather and of insect
pests, will become more regular, the organic timing of life processes
may modify the beat of industrial organization: a spring rush in
mechanical industry, when the fields are beckoning, may be treated
not merely as a mark of ineflScient planning but as an essential sac-
rilege. The human gain from this marriage of town and country, of
industry and agriculture, was constantly present in the best minds of
the nineteenth century, although the state itself seemed an astronom-
ical distance away from them: on this policy the communist Marx,
the social tory, Ruskin, and the anarchist Kropotkin were one. It is
now one of the obvious objectives of a rationally planned economy.

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12: The Planning of Population

Central to the orderly use of resources, the systematic integration
of industry, and the planning and development of human regions, is
perhaps the most important of all neotechnic innovations: the plan-
ning of the growth and distribution of the population.

While births have been controlled from the earliest times by
one empirical device or another, from asceticism to abortion, from
coitus interruptus to the Athenian method of exposing the newborn
infant, the first great improvement in Western Europe came by the
sixteenth century via the Arabs. Fallopius, the discoverer of the
Fallopian tubes, described the use of both the pessary and the sheath.
Like the gardens and palaces of the period, the discovery remained
apparently the property of the upper classes in France and Italy: it
was only in the early nineteenth century that Francis Place and his
disciples attempted to spread the knowledge among the harassed
cotton operatives of England. But the rational practice of contracep-
tion and the improvement in contraceptive devices awaited not merely
the discovery of the exact nature of the germ cell and the process
of fertilization: it also awaited improvements in the technological
means. Effective general contraception, in other words, post-dates
Goodyear and Lister. The first large fall of the English birth rate
took place in the decade 1870-1880, the decade we have already
marked as that which saw the perfection of the gas engine, the
dynamo, the telephone, and the electric filament lamp.

The tabus on sex were so long operative in Christian society that
its scientific investigation was delayed long beyond any other function
of the body: there are even today textbooks on physiology that skip
over the sexual functions with the most hasty allusions: hence a
subject of critical importance to the care and nurture of the race is
still not altogether out of the hands of empirics and superstition-
ridden people, to say nothing of quacks. But the technique of tem-
porary sterilization — so-called birth-control — ^was perhaps the most
important to the human race of all the scientific and technical ad-
vances that were carried to completion during the nineteenth century.
It was the neotechnic answer to that vast, irresponsible spawning

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261

of Western mankind that took place during the paleotechnic phase,
partly in response perhaps to the introduction of new staple foods
and the extension of new food areas, stimulated and abetted by the
fact that copulation was the one art and the one form of recreation
which could not be denied to the factory population, however it or
they might be brutalized.

The effects of contraception were manifold. As far as the personal
life went, it tended to bring about a divorce between the preliminary
sexual functions and the parental ones, since sexual intercourse, pru-
dently conducted, no longer brought with it the imminent likelihood
of offspring. This tended to prolong the period of romantic love
among the newly married: it gave an opportunity for sexual court-
ship and accomplishment to develop, instead of being reduced and
quickly eliminated by early and repeated pregnancies. Contracep-
tion likewise naturally gave the opportunity for the exercise of
sexual relations before accepting the legal responsibilities of mar-
riage and parenthood: this resulted in a devaluation of mere vir-
ginity, while it permitted the erotic life to follow a natural sequence
in growth and efl3orescence without respect to economic or profes-
sional expediency. It therefore lessened to some extent the dangers
of arrested sexual and emotional development, with the strains and
anxieties that so often attend this arrest, by giving opportunities for
sexual intercourse without complete social irresponsibility. More-
over, by permitting intimate sexual knowledge before marriage, it
offered a means for avoiding a more or less permanent relationship
in the case of two people to whose happy union there might be grave
physiological or temperamental obstacles. While contraception, by
doing away with the element of finality, perhaps lowered the weight
of tragic choices, it tended to stabilize the institution of marriage, by
the very fact that it dissociated the social and affectional relation of
parenthood from the more capricious incidence of sexual passion.

But important as contraception was to be in sexual life, particu-
larly in the fact that it restored sex with compensatory vigor to a
more central role in the personality, its wider social effects were
equally important.

Whatever the limits of population growth on the planet may be,

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no one doubts that there are limits. The area of the planet itself is
one limit, and the amount of arable soil and fishable water is another.
In crowded countries like China and India, the population- has in fact
pressed close upon the food supply, and security has alternated with
famine, despite the immense superiority of Chinese agriculture over
most European and American agriculture in the yield it obtains per
acre. With the rising pressure of population in European countries
from the end of the eighteenth century onward, and with the rate of
increase offsetting wars, a high death rate from diseases, and emi-
gration, there was a tidal movement of peoples from the Eastern
Hemisphere to the Western, from Russia into Siberia, and from
China and Japan into Manchuria. Each sparsely populated area
served as a meteorological center of low pressure to attract the cy-
clonic movement of peoples from areas of high pressure. Had all the
population of all countries continued automatically to rise, this move-
ment must in the end have resulted in frantic conflicts — such as that
which began in 1932 between China and Japan — ^with death through
starvation and plague as the only alternative to drastic agricultural
improvement. Under the stress of blind competition and equally blind
fecundity there could be no end to these movements and these mass
wars.

With the widespread practice of birth control, however, a vital
equilibrium was approached at an early date hy France, and is now
on the point of being achieved in England and in the United States.
This equilibrium reduces the number of variables that must be taken
account of in planning, and the size of the population in any area
can now theoretically be related to the permanent resources for sup-
porting life that it provides ; whilst the waste and wear and dissipation
of an uncontrolled birth-rate and a high death-rate is overcome by the
lowering of both sides of the ratio at the same time. As yet, birth
control has come too tardily into practice to have begun to exercise
any measurable control over the affairs of the planet as a whole.
Forces which were set in motion in the past may for two or three
generations stand in the way of the rational ordering of births, except
in the most civilized countries; and the rational re-distribution of the
population of the earth into the most desirable habitats awaits the

THE NEOTECHNIG PHASE

263

general ebbing of the human tide from the point to which it was
whipped up in the nineteenth century.

But the technical means of this change are now for the first time
at hand. So strongly do personal and social interests coincide here
that it is doubtful if the tabus of religion can withstand them. The
very attempts that Catholic physicians have made to discover ^‘'safe”
periods when conception is unlikely is an earnest of the demand to
find a measure which will escape the Church’s somewhat capricious
ban on artificial methods. Even the religion of nationalism, though
stimulated by sadistic exploits, paranoiac delusions of grandeur, and
maniacal desires to impose the national will upon other populations
— even this religion is not immune to the technological achievement
of birth-control, so long as it retains the major elements of modern
technology.

Here, then, is another, instance of that change from quantitative
to qualitative standards that marks the transition from the paleo-
technic economy. The first period was marked by an orgy of uncon-
trolled production and equally uncontrolled reproduction: machine-
fodder and cannon-fodder: surplus values and surplus populations.
In the neotechnic phase the whole emphasis begins to change: not
more births but better births, with greater prospects of survival, with
better opportunities for healthy living and healthy parenthood, un-
tainted by ill-health, preventable diseases, and poverty, not spoiled
by industrial competitions and national wars. These are the new
demands. What rational mind questions their legitimacy? What hu-
mane mind would retard their operation?

13: The Present Pseudomorph

So far, in treating the neotechnic phase, I have concerned myself
more with description and actuality rather than with prophecy and
potentiality. But he who says A in neotechnics has already said B,
and it is with the social implications and consequences of the neo-
technic economy, rather than with its typical technical instruments,
that I purpose to devote the two final chapters of this book.

There is, however, another difficulty in dealing with this phase:
namely, we are still in the midst of the transition. The scientific

264 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

knowledge, the machines and the utilities, the technological methods,
the habits of life and the human ends that belong to this economy
are far from being dominant in our present civilization. The fact is
that in the great industrial areas of Western Europe and America
and in the exploitable territories that are under the control of these
centers, the paleotechnic phase is still intact and all its essential
characteristics are uppermost, even though many of the machines it
uses are neotechnic ones or have been made over — as in the electri-
fication of railroad systems — ^by neotechnic methods. In this per-
sistence of paleotechnic practices the original anti-vital bias of the
machine is evident: bellicose, money-centred, life-curbing, we con-
tinue to worship the twin deities. Mammon and Moloch, to say noth-
ing of more abysmally savage tribal gods.

Even in the midst of the worldwide economic collapse that began
in 1929, the value of what has collapsed was not at first questioned,
though the more faint-hearted advocates of the old order have no
hope now of reconstituting it. And in the one country, Soviet Russia,
that has magnificently attempted to demolish pecuniary standards
and interests, even in Soviet Russia, the elements of the neotechnic
phase are not clear. For despite Lenin’s authentic intuition that
‘^electrification plus socialism equals communism” the worship of
size and crude mechanical power, and the introduction of a mil-
itarist technique in both government and industry go hand in hand
with sane neotechnic achievements in hygiene and education. On one
hand the scientific planning of industry: on the other, the mechanis-
tically conceived bonanza farming, in the fashion of America in the
seventies: here the great centers of electric power, with a potential
decentralization into garden-cities: there the introduction of heavy-
industries into the already congested and obsolete metropolis of
Moscow, and the further waste of energy in the building of costly
subways to intensify that congestion. On different lines from non-
communist countries, one nevertheless observes in Soviet Russia
some of the same confusion and cross-purposes, some of the same
baneful survivals, that prevail elsewhere. What is responsible for this
miscarriage of the machine?

The answer involves something more complex than a cultural lag

THE NEOTECHNIG PHASE

265

or retardation. It is best explained, I think, by a concept put forward
by Oswald Spengler in the second volume of the Decline of the West:
the concept of the cultural pseudomorph. Spengler points to the
common fact in geology that a rock may retain its structure after
certain elements have been leached out of it and been replaced by
an entirely different kind of material. Since the apparent structure
of the old rock remains, the new product is termed a pseudomorph.
A similar metamorphosis is possible in culture: new forces, activities,
institutions, instead of crystallizing independently into their own
appropriate forms, may creep into the structure of an existing civili-
zation. This perhaps is the essential fact of our present situation.
As a civilization, we have not yet entered the neotechnic phase; and
should a future historian use tlie present terminology, he would
undoubtedly have to characterize the current transition as a meso-
technic period: we are still living, in Matthew Arnold’s words, be-
tween two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.

For what has been the total result of all these great scientific dis-
coveries and inventions, these more organic interests, these refine-
ments and delicacies of technique? We have merely used our new
machines and energies to further processes which were begun under
the auspices of capitalist and military enterprise: we have not yet
utilized them to conquer these forms of enterprise and subdue them
to more vital and humane purposes. The examples of pseudomorphic
forms can be drawn from every department. In city growth, for
instance, we have utilized electric and gasoline transportation to
increase the congestion which was the original result of the capital-
istic concentrations of coal and steam power: the new means have
been used to extend the area and population of these obsolete and
inefl&cient and humanly defective metropolitan centers. Similarly the
steel frame construction in architecture, which permits the fullest use
of glass and the most complete utilization of sunlight, has been used
in America to increase the overcrowding of buildings and the oblit-
eration of sunlight. The psychological study of human behavior is
used to condition people to accept the goods offered by the canny
advertisers, despite the fact that science, as applied in the National
Bureau of Standards at Washington, gives measurable and rateable

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

levels of performance for commodities whose worth is now putatively
established by purely stibjective methods. The planning and co-
ordination of productive enterprise, in the hands of private bankers
rather than public servants, becomes a method of preserving monop-
oly control for privileged financial groups or privileged countries.
Labor saving devices, instead of spreading the total amount of
leisure, become means of keeping at a depauperate level an increas-
ing part of the population. The airplane, instead of merely increasing
the amount of travel and intercourse between countries, has increased
their fear of each other: as an instrument of war, in combination
with the latest chemical achievements in poison gas, it promises a
ruthlessness of extermination that man has heretofore not been able
to apply to either bugs or rats. The neotechnic refinement of the
machine, without a coordinate development of higher social purposes,
has only magnified the possibilities of depravity and barbarism.

Not alone have the older forms of technics served to constrain the
development of the neotechnic economy: but the new inventions and
devices have been frequently used to maintain, renew, and stabilize
the structure of the old order. There is a political and financial vested
interest in obsolete technical equipment: that underlying conflict
between business interests and industrial interests, which Veblen
analyzed with great acuteness in The Theory of Business Enterprise,
is accentuated by the fact that vast amounts of capital are sunk in
antiquated machines and burdensome utilities. Financial acquisitive-
ness which had originally speeded invention now furthers technical
inertia. Hence the tardiness in introducing the automatic telephone:
hence the continued design of automobiles in terms of superficial
fashions, rather than with any readiness to take advantage of aero-
dynamic principles in building for comfort and speed and economy:
hence the continued purchase of patent rights for improvements which
are then quietly extirpated by the monopoly holding them.

And this reluctance, this resistance, this inertia have good reason:
the old has every cause to fear the superiority of the new. The planned
and integrated industry of neotechnic design promises so much
greater efficiency than the old that not a single institution appropriate
to an economy of parsimony will remain imaltered in an economy

THE NEOTECHNIC PHASE

267

of surplus: particularly the institutions limiting ownership and divi-
dends to a small fragment of the population, who thus absorb the
purchasing power by excessive re-investment in industrial enterprise
and add to its over-expansion. These institutions, indeed, are incom-
patible with a planned production and distribution of the necessaries
of life, for financial values and real goods cannot be equated to the
advantage of the whole community on terms that will benefit chiefly
the private capitalists by and for whom the original structure of
capitalism was created.

One need not wonder that those who affect to control the destinies
of industrial society, the bankers, the business men, and the politi-
cians, have steadily put the brakes upon the transition and have
sought to limit the neotechnic developments and avoid the drastic
changes that must be effected throughout the entire social milieu.
The present pseudomorph is, socially and technically, third-rate. It
has only a fraction of the efficiency that the neotechnic civilization
as a whole may possess, provided it finally produces its own institu-
tional forms and controls and directions and patterns. At present,
instead of finding these forms, we have applied our skill and inven-
tion in such a manner as to give a fresh lease of life to many of the
obsolete capitalist and militarist institutions of the older period.
Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means: that is the most obvious
characteristic of the present order. And that is why a good part of the
machines and institutions that boast of being “new” or “advanced”
or “progressive” are often so only in the way that a modem battle-
ship is new and advanced: they may in fact be reactionary, and they
may stand in the way of the fresh integration of work and art and
life that we must seek and create.

CHAPTER VI. COMPENSATIONS AND

REVERSIONS

1 : Summary of Social Reactions

Each of the three phases of machine civilization has left its de-
posits in society. Each has changed the landscape, altered the physical
layout of cities, used certain resources and spurned others, favored
certain types of commodity and certain paths of activity, and modi-
fied the common technical heritage. It is the sum total of these phases,
confused, jumbled, contradictory, cancelling out as well as adding
to their forces that constitutes our present mechanical civilization.
Some aspects of this civilization are in complete decay; some are
alive but neglected in thought; still others are at the earliest stages of
development. To call this complicated inheritance the Power Age or
the Machine Age is to conceal more facts about it than one reveals.
If the machine appears to dominate life today, it is only because
society is even more disrupted than it was in the seventeenth century.

But along with the positive transformations of the environment by
means of the machine have come the reactions of society against the
machine. Despite the long period of cultural preparation, the machine
encountered inertia and resistance: in general, the Catholic countries
were slower to accept it than were the Protestant countries, and the
agricultural regions assimilated it far less completely than the mining
districts. Modes of life essentially hostile to the machine have re-
mained in existence: the institutional life of the churches, while often
subservient to capitalism, has remained foreign to the naturalistic
and mechanistic interests which helped develop the machine. Hence
the machine itself has been deflected or metamorphosed to a certain

degree by the human reactions which it has set up, or to which, in

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COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 269

one manner or another, it has been forced to adapt itself. Many social
adjustments have resulted from the machine which were far from
the minds of Jthe original philosophers of industrialism. They ex-
pected the old social institutions of feudalism to be dissolved by the
new order: they did not anticipate that they might be re-crystallized.

It is only in economic textbooks, moreover, that the Economic Man
and the Machine Age have ever maintained the purity of their ideal
images. Before the paleotechnic period was well under way their
images were already tarnished: free competition was curbed from
the start by the trade agreements and anti-union collaborations of the
very industrialists who shouted most loudly for it. And the retreat
from the machine, headed by philosophers and poets and artists, ap-
peared at the very moment that the forces of utilitarianism seemed
most coherent and confident. The successes of mechanism only in-
creased the awareness of values not included in a mechanistic ide-
ology — ^values derived, not from the machine, but from other prov-
inces of life. Any just appreciation of the machine’s contribution to
civilization must reckon with these resistances and compensations.

2: The Mechanical Routine

Let the reader examine for himself the part played by mechanical
routine and mechanical apparatus in his day, from the alarm-clock
that wakes him to the radio program that puts him to sleep. Instead
of adding to his burden by re-capitulating it, I purpose to sum-
marize the results of his investigations, and analyze the consequences.

The first characteristic of modern machine civilization is its tem-
poral regularity. From the moment of waking, the rhythm of the
day is punctuated by the clock. Irrespective of strain or fatigue,
despite reluctance or apathy, the household rises close to its set
hour. Tardiness in rising is penalized by extra haste in eating break-
fast or in walking to catch the train: in the long run, it may even
mean the loss of a job or of advancement in business. Breakfast,
lunch, dinner, occur at regular hours and are of definitely limited
duration: a million people perform these functions within a very
narrow band of time, and only minor provisions are made for those
who would have food outside this regular schedule. As the scale of

270 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

industrial organization grows, the punctuality and regularity of the
mechanical regime tend to increase with it: the time-clock enters
automatically to regulate the entrance and exit of the worker, while
an irregular worker — ^tempted by the trout in spring streams or
ducks on salt meadows — finds that these impulses are as unfavorably
treated as habitual drunkenness: if he would retain them, he must
remain attached to the less routinized provinces of agriculture. '‘The
refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms
of diligence,” of which Ure wrote a century ago with such pious
horror, have indeed been tamed.

Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordi-
nating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money
an independent commodity with a value of its own. The school
teacher, the lawyer, even the doctor with his schedule of operations
conform their functions to a time-table almost as rigorous as that
of the locomotive engineer. In the case of child-birth, patience
rather than instrumentation is one of the chief requirements for a
successful normal delivery and one of the major safeguards against
infection in a difficult one. Here the mechanical interference of the
obstetrician, eager to resume his rounds, has apparently been largely
responsible for the current discreditable record of American physi-
cians, utilizing the most sanitary hospital equipment, in comparison
with midwives who do not attempt brusquely to hasten the processes
of nature. While regularity in certain physical functions, like eating
and eliminating, may in fact assist in maintaining health, in other
matters, like play, sexual intercourse, and other forms of recreation
the strength of the impulse itself is pulsating rather than evenly
recurrent: here habits fostered by the clock or the calendar may
lead to dullness and decay.

Hence the existence of a machine civilization, completely timed
and scheduled and regulated, does not necessarily guarantee maxi-
mum efficiency in any sense. Time-keeping establishes a useful point
of reference, and is invaluable for co-ordinating diverse groups and
functions which lack any other common frame of activity. In the
practice of an individual’s vocation such regularity may greatly
assist concentration and economize effort. But to make it arbitrarily

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 271

rule over human functions is to reduce existence itself to mere time-
serving and to spread the shades of the prison-house over too large
an area of human conduct. The regularity that produces apathy and
atrophy — ^that acedia which was the bane of monastic existence, as
it is likewise of the army — is as wasteful as the irregularity that
produces disorder and confusion. To utilize the accidental, the un-
predictable, the fitful is as necessary, even in terms of economy, as
to utilize the regular: activities which exclude the operations of
chance impulses forfeit some of the advantages of regularity.

In short: mechanical time is not an absolute. And a population
trained to keep to a mechanical time routine at whatever sacrifice
to health, convenience, and organic felicity may well suffer from the
strain of that discipline and find life impossible without the most
strenuous compensations. The fact that sexual intercourse in a mod-
ern city is limited, for workers in all grades and departments, to
the fatigued hours of the day may add to the eSiciency of the working
life only by a too-heavy sacrifice in personal and organic relations.
Not the least of the blessings promised by the shortening of working
hours is the opportunity to carry into bodily play the vigor that has
hitherto been exhausted in the service of machines.

Next to mechanical regularity, one notes the fact that a good
part of the mechanical elements in the day are attempts to counteract
the effects of lengthening time and space distances. The refrigera-
tion of eggs, for example, is an effort to space their distribution more
uniformly than the hen herself is capable of doing: the pasteurization
of milk is an attempt to counteract the effect of the time consumed
in completing the chain between the cow and the remote consumer.
The accompanying pieces of mechanical apparatus do nothing to
improve the product itself: refrigeration merely halts the process
of decomposition, while pasteurization actually robs the milk of
some of its value as nutriment. Where it is possible to distribute
the population closer to the rural centers where milk and butter
and green vegetables are grown, the elaborate mechanical apparatus
for counteracting time and space distances may to a large degree
be diminished.

One might multiply such examples from many departments; they

272 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

point to a fact about the machine that has not been generally recog-
nized by those quaint apologists for machine-capitalism who look
upon every extra expenditure of horsepower and every fresh piece
of mechanical apparatus as an automatic net gain in efficiency. In
The Instinct of Workmanship Veblen has indeed wondered whether
the typewriter, the telephone, and the automobile, though creditable
technological achievements “have not wasted more effort and sub-
stance than they have saved,” whether they are not to be credited
with an appreciable economic loss, because they have increased the
pace and the volume of correspondence and communication and travel
out of all proportion to the real need. And Mr. Bertrand Russell has
noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area
over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who
would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century
ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because
the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he
remained in his original situation now — ^by driving him to a more
distant residential area — effectually cancels out the gain.

One further effect of our closer time co-ordination and our instan-
taneous communication must be noted here: broken time and broken
attention. The difficulties of transport and communication before
1850 automatically acted as a selective screen, which permitted
no more stimuli to reach a person than he could handle: a certain
urgency was necessary before one received a call from a long dis-
tance or was compelled to make a journey oneself: this condition
of slow physical locomotion kept intercourse down to a human scale,
and under definite control. Nowadays this screen has vanished: the
remote is as close as the near: the ephemeral is as emphatic as the
durable. While the tempo of the day has been quickened by instan-
taneous communication the rhythm of the day has been broken: the
radio, the telephone, the daily newspaper clamor for attention, and
amid the host of stimuli to which people are subjected, it becomes
more and more difficult to absorb and cope with any one part of
the environment, to say nothing of dealing with it as a whole. The
common man is as subject to these interruptions as the scholar or
the man of affairs, and even the weekly period of cessation from

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COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

familiar tasks and contemplative reverie, which was one of the
great contributions of Western religion to the discipline of the per-
sonal life, has become an ever remoter possibility. These mechanical
aids to efficiency and cooperation and intelligence have been merci-
lessly exploited, through commercial and political pressure: but so
far — since unregulated and undisciplined — ^they have been obstacles
to the very ends they affect to further. We have multiplied the me-
chanical demands without multiplying in any degree our human
capacities for registering and reacting intelligently to them. With
the successive demands of the outside world so frequent and so
imperative, without any respect to their real importance, the inner
world becomes progressively meager and formless: instead of active
selection there is passive absorption ending in the state happily
described by Victor Branford as “addled subjectivity.’’

3: Purposeless Materialism: Superfluous Power

Growing out of its preoccupation with quantity production is the
machine’s tendency to center effort exclusively upon the production
of material goods. There is a disproportionate emphasis on the physi-
cal means of living: people sacrifice time and present enjoyments
in order that they acquire a greater abundance of physical means;
for there is supposed to be a close relation between well-being and
the number of bathtubs, motor cars, and similar machine-made prod-
ucts that one may possess. This tendency, not to satisfy the physical
needs of life, but to expand toward an indefinite limit the amount
of physical equipment that is applied to living is not exclusively
characteristic of the machine, because it has existed as a natural
accompaniment of other phases of capitalism in other civilizations.
What is typical of the machine is the fact that these ideals, instead
of being confined to a class, have been vulgarized and spread — at
least as an ideal — ^in every section of society.

One may define this aspect of the machine as “purposeless ma-
terialism.” Its particular defect is that it casts a shadow of reproach
upon all the non-material interests and occupations of mankind: in
particular, it condemns liberal esthetic and intellectual interests be-
cause “they serve no useful purpose.” One of the blessings of inven-

274 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tion, among the naive advocates of the machine, is that it does away
with the need for the imagination: instead of holding a conversation
with one’s distant friend in reverie, one may pick up a telephone
and substitute his voice for one’s fantasy. If stirred by an emotion,
instead of singing a song or writing a poem, one may turn on a
phonograph record. It is no disparagement of either the phonograph
or the telephone to suggest that their special functions do not take
the place of a dynamic imaginative life, nor does an extra bath-
room, however admirably instrumental, take the place of a picture
or a flower-garden. The brute fact of the matter is that our civiliza-
tion is now weighted in favor of the use of mechanical instruments,
because the opportunities for commercial production and for the
exercise of power lie there: while all the direct human reactions or
the personal arts which require a minimum of mechanical parapher-
nalia are treated as negligible. The habit of producing goods whether
they are needed or not, of utilizing inventions whether they are
useful or not, of applying power whether it is effective or not per-
vades almost every department of our present civilization. The result
is that whole areas of the personality have been slighted: the telic,
rather than the merely adaptive, spheres of conduct exist on suffer-
ance. This pervasive instrumentalism places a handicap upon vital
reactions which cannot be closely tied to the machine, and it magni-
fies the importance of physical goods as symbols — symbols of intelli-
gence and ability and far-sightedness — even as it tends to characterize
their absence as a sign of stupidity and failure. And to the extent
that this materialism is purposeless, it becomes final: the means are
presently converted into an end. If material goods need any other
justification, they have it in the fact that the effort to consume them
keeps the machines running.

These space-contracting, time-saving, goods-enhancing devices are
likewise manifestations of modern power production: and the same
paradox holds of power and power-machinery: its economies have
been partly cancelled out by increasing the opportunity, indeed the
very necessity, for consumption. The situation was put very neatly
a long time ago by Babbage, the English mathematician. He relates
an experiment performed by a Frenchman, M. Redelet, in which a

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 275

block of squared stone was taken as the subject for measuring the
effort required to move it. It weighed 1080 pounds. In order to drag
the stone, roughly chiseled, along the floor of the quarry, it required
a force equal to 758 pounds. The same stone dragged over a floor
of planks required 652 pounds; on a platform of wood, drawn over
a floor of planks, it required 606 pounds. After soaping the two
surfaces of wood which slid over each other it required 182 pounds.
The same stone was now placed upon rollers three inches in diam-
ter, when it required to put it in motion along the floor of the
quarry only 34 pounds, while to drag it by these rollers over a
wooden floor it needed but 22 pounds.

This is a simple illustration of the two ways open in applying
power to modern production. One is to increase the expenditure of
power; the other is to economize in the application of it. Many of
our so-called gains in efficiency have consisted, in effect, of using
power-machines to apply 758 pounds to work which could be just
as efficiently accomplished by careful planning and preparation with
an expenditure of 22 pounds: our illusion of superiority is based
on the fact that we have had 736 pounds to waste. This fact explains
some of the grotesque miscalculations and misappraisals that have
been made in comparing the working efficiency of past ages with
the present. Some of our technologists have committed the blunder
of confusing the increased load of equipment and the increased
expenditure of energy with the quantity of effective work done. But
the billions of horsepower available in modern production must be
balanced off against losses which are even greater than those for
which Stuart Chase has made a tangible estimate in his excellent
study of The Tragedy of Waste. While a net gain can probably be
shown for modern civilization, it is not nearly so great as we have
imagined through our habit of looking only at one side of the balance
sheet.

The fact is that an elaborate mechanical organization is often
a temporary and expensive substitute for an effective social organiza-
tion or for a sound biological adaptation. The secret of analyzing
motions, of harnessing energies, of designing machines was discov-
ered before we began an orderly analysis of modern society and

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attempted to control the unconscious drift of technic and economic
forces. Just as the ingenious mechanical restorations of teeth begun
in the nineteenth century anticipated our advance in physiology
and nutrition, which will reduce the need for mechanical repair, so
many of our other mechanical triumphs are merely stopgaps, to
serve society whilst it learns to direct its social institutions, its
biological conditions, and its personal aims more effectively. In other
words, much of our mechanical apparatus is useful in the same way
that a crutch is useful when a leg is injured. Inferior to the normal
functioning leg, the crutch assists its user to walk about whilst bone
and tissue are being repaired. The common mistake is that of fancy-
ing that a society in which everyone is equipped with crutches is
thereby more efficient than one in which the majority of people walk
on two legs.

We have with considerable cleverness devised mechanical appa-
ratus to counteract the effect of lengthening time and space distances,
to increase the amount of power available for performing unnecessary
work, and to increase the waste of time attendant upon irrelevant
and superficial intercourse. But our success in doing these things has
blinded us to the fact that such devices are not by themselves marks
of efficiency or of intelligent social effort. Canning and refrigeration
as a means of distributing a limited food supply over the year, or
of making it available in areas distant from the place originally
grown, represent a real gain. The use of canned goods, on the other
hand, in country districts when fresh fruits and vegetables are avail-
able comes to a vital and social loss. The very fact that mechaniza-
tion lends itself to large-scale industrial and financial organization,
and marches in step with the whole distributing mechanism of capi-
talist society frequently gives an advantage to such indirect and
ultimately more inefficient methods. There is, however, no virtue
whatever in eating foods that are years old or that have been trans-
ported thousands of miles, when equally good foods are available
without going out of the locality. It is a lack of rational distribution
that permits this process to go on in our society. Power machines
have given a sort of licence to social inefficiency. This licence was
tolerated all the more easily because what the community as a whole .

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 277

lost through these misapplied energies enterprising individuals gained
in profits.

The point is that eificiency is currently confused with adaptability
to large-scale factory production and marketing: that is to say, with
fitness for the present methods of commercial exploitation. But in
terms of social life, many of the most extravagant advances of the
machine have proved to rest on the invention of intricate means of
doing things which can be performed at a minor cost by very simple
ones. Those complicated pieces of apparatus, first devised by Ameri-
can cartoonists, and later carried onto the stage by comedians like
Mr. Joe Cook, in which a whole series of mechanisms and involved
motions are created in order to burst a paper bag or lick a postage
stamp are not wild products of the American imagination: they are
merely transpositions into the realm of the comic of processes which
can be witnessed at a hundred different points in actual life. Elabo-
rate antiseptics are offered in expensive mechanically wrapped pack-
ages, made tempting by lithographs and printed advertisements, to
take the place which common scientific knowledge indicates is amply
filled by one of the most common minerals, sodium chloride. Vacuum
pumps driven by electric motors are forced into American house-
holds for the purpose of cleaning an obsolete form of floor cover-
ing, the carpet or the rug, whose appropriateness for use in interiors,
if it did not disappear with the caravans where it originated, certainly
passed out of existence with rubber heels and steam-heated houses.
To count such pathetic examples of waste to the credit of the machine
is like counting the rise in the number of constipation remedies a
proof of the benefits of leisure.

The third important characteristic of the machine process and
machine environment is uniformity, standardization, replaceability.
Whereas handicraft, by the very nature of human work, exhibits
constant variations and adaptations, and boasts of the fact that no
two products are alike, machine work has just the opposite charac-
teristic: it prides itself on the fact that the millionth motor car built
to a specific pattern is exactly like the first. Speaking generally,
the machine has replaced an unlimited series of variables with a

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limited number of constants: if the range of possibility is lessened,
the area of prediction and control is increased.

And while the uniformity of performance in human beings,
pushed beyond a certain point, deadens initiative and lowers the
whole tone of the organism, uniformity of performance in machines
and standardization of the product works in the opposite direction.
The dangers of standardized products have in fact been over-rated
by people who have applied the same criterion to machines as they
would to the behavior of living beings. This danger has been further
over-stressed by those who look upon uniformity as in itself bad,
and upon variation as in itself good: whereas monotony (uniformity)
and variety are in reality polar characteristics, neither of which can
or should be eliminated in the conduct of life. Standardization and
repetition have in fact the part in our social economy that habit
has in the human organism: by pushing below the level of conscious-
ness certain recurrent elements in our experience, they free attention
for the non-mechanical, the unexpected, the personal. (I shall deal
with the social and esthetic importance of this fact when I discuss the
assimilation of our machine culture.)

4: Co-operation versus Slavery

One of the by-products of the development of mechanical devices
and mechanical standards has been the nullification of skill: what
has taken place here within the factory has also taken place in the
final utilization of its products. The safety razor, for example, has
changed the operation of shaving from a hazardous one, best left
to a trained barber, to a rapid commonplace of the day which even
the most inept males can perform. The automobile has transformed
engine-driving from the specialized task of the locomotive engineer
to the occupation of millions of amateurs. The camera has in part
transformed the artful reproductions of the wood engraver to a rela-
tively simple photo-chemical process in which anyone can acquire
at least the rudiments. As in manufacture the human function first
becomes specialized, then mechanized, and finally automatic or at
least semi-automatic.

When the last stage is reached, the function again takes on some

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

279

of its original non-specialized character: photography helps reculti-
vate the eye, the telephone the voice, the radio the ear, just as the
motor car has restored some of the manual and operative skills
that the machine was banishing from other departments of existence
at the same time that it has given to the driver a sense of power and
autonomous direction — a feeling of firm command in the midst of
potentially constant danger — ^that had been taken away from him in
other departments of life by the machine. So, too, mechanization, by
lessening the need for domestic service, has increased the amount
of personal autonomy and personal participation in the household.
In short, mechanization creates new occasions for human effort; and
on the whole the effects are more educative than were the semi-auto-
matic services of slaves and menials in the older civilizations. For
the mechanical nullification of skill can take place only up to a
certain point. It is only when one has completely lost the power of
discrimination that a standardized canned soup can, without further
preparation, take the place of a home-cooked one, or when one has
lost prudence completely that a four-wheel brake can serve instead
of a good driver. Inventions like these increase the province and
multiply the interests of the amateur. When automatism becomes
general and the benefits of mechanization are socialized, men will
be back once more in the Edenlike state in which they have existed
in regions of natural increment, like the South Seas: the ritual of
leisure will replace the ritual of work, and work itself will become
a kind of game. That is, in fact, the ideal goal of a completely
mechanized and automatized system of power production: the elimi-
nation of work: the universal achievement of leisure. In his discus-
sion of slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself
and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need
helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he
was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he
was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is
true, is the constant form of man’s interaction with his environment,
if hy work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to main-
tain life; and lack of work usually means an impairment of function
and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms

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of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. But work in the form of
unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which, as Mr. Alfred
Zimmern reminds us, the Athenians so properly despised — ^work in
these degrading forms is the true province of machines. Instead of
reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer
the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentiality,
still so far from effective achievement for mankind at large, is per-
haps the largest justification of the mechanical developments of the
last thousand years.

From the social standpoint, one final characterization of the ma-
chine, perhaps the most important of all, must be noted: the machine
imposes the necessity for collective effort and widens its range. To
the extent that men have escaped the control of nature they must
submit to the control of society. As in a serial operation every part
must function smoothly and be geared to the right speed in order
to ensure the effective working of the process as a whole, so in society
at large there must be a close articulation between all its elements.
Individual self-sufiiciency is another way of saying technological
crudeness: as our technics becomes more refined it becomes impos-
sible to work the machine without large-scale collective cooperation,
and in the long run a high technics is possible only on a basis of
worldwide trade and intellectual intercourse. The machine has broken
down the relative isolation — ^never complete even in the most primi-
tive societies — of the handicraft period: it has intensified the need
for collective effort and collective order. The efforts to achieve col-
lective participation have been fumbling and empirical: so for the
most part, people are conscious of the necessity in the form of limi-
tations upon personal freedom and initiative — ^limitations like the
automatic traffic signals of a congested center, or like the red-tape
in a large commercial organization. The collective nature of the
machine process demands a special enlargement of the imagination
and a special education in order to keep the collective demand
itself from becoming an act of external regimentation. To die extent
that the collective discipline becomes effective and the various groups
in society are worked into a nicely interlocking organization, special
provisions must be made for isolated and anarchic elements that

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

281

are not included in such a wide-reaching collectivism — elements that
cannot without danger be ignored or repressed. But to abandon
the social collectivism imposed by modern technics means to re-
turn to nature and be at the mercy of natural forces.

The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical power, the
multiplication of goods, the contraction of time and space, the stand-
ardization of performance and product, the transfer of skill to
automata, and the increase of collective interdependence — ^these,
then, are the chief characteristics of our machine civilization. They
are the basis of the particular forms of life and modes of expression
that distinguish Western Civilization, at least in degree, from the
various earlier civilizations that preceded it.

In the translation of technical improvements into social processes,
however, the machine has undergone a perversion: instead of being
utilized as an instrument of life, it has tended to become an absolute.
Power and social control, once exercised chiefly by military groups
who had conquered and seized the land, have gone since the seven-
teenth century to those who have organized and controlled and owned
the machine. The machine has been valued because — it increased
the employment of machines. And such employment was the source
of profits, power, and wealth to the new ruling classes, benefits which
had hitherto gone to traders or to those who monopolized the land.
Jungles and tropical islands were invaded- during the nineteenth
century for the purpose of making new converts to the machine:
explorers like Stanley endured incredible tortures and hardships in
order to bring the benefits of the machine to inaccessible regions
tapt by the Congo: insulated countries like Japan were entered for-
cibly at the point of the gun in order to make way for the trader:
natives in Africa and the Americas were saddled with false debts
or malicious taxes in order to give them an incentive to work and to
consume in the machine fashion — and thus to supply an outlet for the
goods of America and Europe, or to ensure the regular gathering of
rubber and lac.

The injunction to use machines was so imperative, from the stand-
point of those who owned them and whose means and place in
society depended upon them, that it placed upon the worker a special

282 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

burden, the duty to consume machine-products, while it placed upon
the manufacturer and the engineer the duty of inventing products
weak enough and shoddy enough — ^like the safety razor blade or the
common run of American woolens — ^to lend themselves to rapid re-
placement. The great heresy to the machine was to believe in an
institution or a habit of action or a system of ideas that would lessen
this service to the machines: for under capitalist direction the aim
of mechanism is not to save labor but to eliminate all labor except
that which can be channeled at a profit through the factory.

At the beginning, the machine was an attempt to substitute quantity
for value in the calculus of life. Between the conception of the ma-
chine and its utilization, as Krannhals points out, a necessary
psychological and social process was skipped: the stage of evaluation.
Thus a steam turbine may contribute thousands of horsepower, and
a speedboat may achieve speed: hut these facts, which perhaps satisfy
the engineer, do not necessarily integrate them in society. Railroads
may be quicker than canalboats, and a gas-lamp may be brighter than
a candle: but it is only in terms of human purpose and in relation to
a human and social scheme of values that speed or brightness have
any meaning. If one wishes to absorb the scenery, the slow motion
of a canalboat may be preferable to the fast motion of a motor car;
and if one wishes to appreciate the mysterious darkness and the
strange forms of a natural cave, it is better to penetrate it with un-
certain steps, with the aid of a torch or a lantern, than to descend
into it by means of an elevator, as in the famous caves of Virginia,
and to have the mystery entirely erased by a grand display of electric
lights — ^a commercialized perversion that puts the whole spectacle
upon the low dramatic level of a cockney amusement park.

Because the process of social evaluation was largely absent among
the people who developed the machine in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries the machine raced like an engine without a governor,
tending to overheat its own bearings and lower its efficiency without
any compensatory gain. This left the process of evaluation to groups
who remained outside the machine milieu, and who unfortunately
often lacked the knowledge and the understanding that would have
made their criticisms more pertinent.

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 283

The important thing to bear in mind is that the failure to evaluate
the machine and to integrate it in society as a whole was not due
simply to defects in distributing income, to errors of management, to
the greed and narrow-mindedness of the industrial leaders: it was
also due to a weakness of the entire philosophy upon which the new
techniques and inventions were grounded. The leaders and enter-
prisers of the period believed that they had avoided the necessity
for introducing values, except those which were automatically re-
corded in profits and prices. They believed that the problem of justly
distributing goods could be sidetracked by creating an abundance
of them: that the problem of applying one’s energies wisely could be
cancelled out simply by multiplying them: in short, that most of the
difficulties that had hitherto vexed mankind had a mathematical or
mechanical — that is a quantitative — solution. The belief that values
could be dispensed with constituted the new system of values. Values,
divorced from the current processes of life, remained the concern of
those who reacted against the machine. Meanwhile, the current
processes justified themselves solely in terms of quantity production
and cash results. When the machine as a whole overspeeded and
purchasing power failed to keep pace with dishonest overcapitaliza-
tion and exorbitant profits — then the whole machine went suddenly
into reverse, stripped its gears, and came to a standstill: a hximiliating
failure, a dire social loss.

One is confronted, then, by the fact that the machine is ambivalent.
It is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression. It has
economized human energy and it has misdirected it. It has created a
wide framework of order and it has produced muddle and chaos. It
has nobly served human purposes and it has distorted and denied
them. Before I attempt to discuss in greater detail those aspects
of the machine that have been effectively assimilated and that have
worked well, I purpose to discuss the resistances and compensations
created by the machine. For neither this new type of civilization
nor its ideal has gone unchallenged: the human spirit has not bowed
to the machine in complete submission. In every phase of existence
the machine has stirred up antipathies, dissents, reactions, some
weak, hysterical, unjustified, others that are in their nature so inevi-

284 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

table, so sound, that one cannot touch the future of the machine
without taking them into account. Similarly the compensations that
have arisen to overcome or mitigate the effects of the new routine of
life and work call attention to dangers in the partial integration that
now exists.

5 : Direct Attack on the Machine

The conquest of Western Civilization by the machine was not
accomplished without stubborn resistance on the part of institutions
and habits and impulses which did not lend themselves to mechanical
organization. From the very beginning the machine provoked com-
pensatory or hostile reactions. In the world of ideas, romanticism
and utilitarianism go side by side: Shakespeare with his cult of
the individual hero and his emphasis of nationalism appeared at
the same time as the pragmatic Bacon, and the emotional fervor of
Wesley’s Methodism spread like fire in dry grass through the very
depressed classes that were subject to the new factory regime. The
direct reaction of the machine was to make people materialistic and
rational: its indirect action was often to make them hyper-emotional
and irrational. The tendency to ignore the second set of reactions
because they did not logically coincide with the claims of the machine
has unfortunately been common in many critics of the new industrial
order: even Veblen was not free from it.

Resistance to mechanical improvements took a wide variety of
forms. The most direct and simple form was to smash the offend-
ing machine itself or to murder its inventor.

The destruction of machines and the prohibition of invention,
which so beneficently transformed the society of Butler’s Erewhon,
might have been accomplished by the working classes of Europe but
for two facts. First: the direct war against the machine was an un-
evenly matched struggle; for the financial and military powers were
on the side of the classes that were bent on exploiting the machine,
and in a pinch the soldiery, armed with their new machines, could
demolish the resistance of the handworkers with a voUey of musketry.
As long as invention took place sporadically, the introduction of a
single machine could well be retarded by direct attack: once it ope-

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 285

rated on a wide and united front no mere local rebellion could more
than temporarily hold up its advance: a successful challenge would
have needed a degree of organization which in the very nature of
the case the working classes did not have — indeed lack even today.

The second point was equally important: life and energy and
adventure were at first on the side of the machine: handicraft was
associated with the fixed, the sessile, the superannuated, the dying:
it manifestly shrank away from the new movements in thought and
from the ordeal of the new reality. The machine meant fresh revela-
tions, new possibilities of action: it brought with it a revolutionary
elan. Youth was on its side. Seeking only the persistence of old ways,
the enemies of the machine were fighting a rear-guard retreat, and
they were on the side of the dead even when they espoused the
organic against the mechanical.

As soon as the machine came to predominate in actual life, the
only place where it could be successfully attacked or resisted was
in the attitudes and interests of those who worked it. The extent to
which unmechanical ideologies and programs have flourished since
the seventeenth century, despite the persistent habituation of the
machine, is in part a measure of the amount of resistance that the
machine has, directly or indirectly, occasioned.

6: Romantic and Utilitarian

The broadest general split in ideas occasioned by the machine
was that between the Romantic and the Utilitarian. Carried along
by the industrial and commercial ideals of his age, the utilitarian
was at one with its purposes. He believed in science and inventions,
in profits and power, in machinery and progress, in money and com-
fort, and he believed in spreading these ideals to other societies by
means of free trade, and in allowing some of the benefits to filter
down from the possessing classes to the exploited — or as they are
now euphemistically called, the “underprivileged” — ^provided that
this was done prudently enough to keep the lower classes diligently
at work in a state of somnolent and respectful submission.

The newness of the mechanical products was, from the utilitarian
standpoint, a guarantee of their worth. The utilitarian wished to put

286 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

as much distance as possible between his own society of unfettered
money-making individuals and the ideals of a feudal and corporate
life. These ideals, with their traditions, loyalties, sentiments, consti-
tuted a brake upon the introduction of changes and mechanical im-
provements: the sentiments that clustered around an old house might
stand in the way of opening a mine that ran underneath it, even as
the aflFection that often entered into the relation of master and
servant under the more patriarchal older regime might stand in
the way of that enlightened self-interest which would lead to the
dismissal of the worker as soon as the market was slack. What most
obviously prevented a clean victory of capitalistic and mechanical
ideals was the tissue of ancient institutions and habits of thought:
the belief that honor might be more important than money or that
friendly affection and comradeship might be as powerful a motive
in life as profit making: or that present animal health might be
more precious than future material acquisitions — in short, that the
whole man might be worth preserving at the expense of the utmost
success and power of the Economic Man. Indeed, some of the sharpest
criticism of the new mechanical creed came from the tory aristocrats
in England, France, and in the Southern States of the United States.

Romanticism in all its manifestations, from Shakespeare to Wil-
liam Morris, from Goethe and the Brothers Grimm to Nietzsche, from
Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo, was an attempt to restore the
essential activities of human life to a central place in the new scheme,
instead of accepting the machine as a center, and holding all its
values to be final and absolute.

In its animus, romanticism was right; for it represented those vital
and historic and organic attributes that had been deliberately elimi-
nated from the concepts of science and from the methods of the
earlier technics, and it provided necessary channels of compensation.
Vital organs of life, which have been amputated through historic
accident, must be restored at least in fantasy, as preliminary to their
actual rebuilding in fact: a psychosis is sometimes the only possible
alternative to complete disruption and death. Unfortunately, in its
comprehension of the forces that were at work in society the romantic
movement was weak: overcome "by the callous destruction that at-

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tended the introduction of the machine, it did not distinguish between
the forces that were hostile to life and those that served it, but tended
to lump them all in the same compartment, and to turn its back upon
them. In its effort to find remedies for the dire weakness and perver-
sions of industrial society, romanticism avoided the very energies
by which alone it could hope to create a more sufficient pattern of
existence — ^namely, the energies that were focussed in science and
technics and in the mass of new machine-workers themselves. The
romantic movement was retrospective, walled- in, sentimental: in a
word, regressive. It lessened the shock of the new order, but it was,
for the greater part, a movement of escape.

But to confess this is not to say that the romantic movement was
unimportant or unjustified. On the contrary, one cannot comprehend
the typical dilemmas of the new civilization unless one understands
the reason and the rationale of the romantic reaction against it, and
sees how necessary it is to import the positive elements in the
romantic attitude into the new social synthesis. Romanticism as an
alternative to the machine is dead: indeed it never was alive: hut
the forces and ideas once archaically represented by romanticism
are necessary ingredients in the new civilization, and the need today
is to translate them into direct social modes of expression, instead
of continuing them in the old form of an unconscious or deliberate
regression into a past that can be retrieved only in phantasy.

The romantic reaction took many forms: and I shall consider
only the three dominant ones: the cult of history and nationalism,
the cult of nature, and the cult of the primitive. The same period
saw likewise the cult of the isolated individual, and the revival of
old theologies and theosophies and supernaturalisms, which owed
their existence and much of their strength no doubt to the same
denials and emptinesses that prompted the more specially romantic
revivals: but it is next to impossible to distinguish clearly between
the continued interests of religion and their modern revivals; so I
shall confine this analysis to the romantic reaction proper; for this
plainly accompanied and probably grew out of the new situation.

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7 : The Cult of the Past

The cult of the past did not immediately develop in response
to the machine; it was, in Italy, an attempt to resume the ideas and
forms of classic civilization, and during the Renascence the cult
was, in fact, a sort of secret ally to the machine. Did it not, like the
machine, challenge the validity of the existing traditions in both
philosophy and daily life? Did it not give more authority to the
manuscripts of ancient authors, to Hero of Alexandria in physics,
to Vitruvius in architecture, to Columella in farming, than it did to
the existing body of tradition and the practices of contemporary
masters? Did it not, by breaking with the immediate past, encourage
the future to break with the present?

The recovery of the classic past during the Renascence caused
a break in the historic continuity of Western Europe; and this gap,
which opened in education and the formal arts, made a breach of
which the machine promptly took advantage. By the eighteenth cen-
tury the Renascence culture itself was sterilized, pedanticized, for-
malized: it gave itself over to the recovery and reproduction of
dead forms; and though a Poussin or a Piranesi could revitalize
these forms with a little of the flair and confidence that the men of
the late fifteenth century had felt, the neo-classic and the mechanical
played into each other’s hands: in the sense of being divorced from
life, the first was even more mechanical than mechanism itself. It
is not perhaps altogether an accident that at a distance the palaces
of Versailles and St. Petersburg have the aspect of modern factory
buildings. When the cult of the past revived again, it was directed
against both the arid humanism of the eighteenth century and the
equally arid dehumanism of the mechanical age. William Blake,
with his usual true instinct for fundamental differences, attacked
with equal vehemence Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Isaac Newton.

In the eighteenth century a cultured man was one who knew his
Greek and Latin classics; an enlightened man was one who regarded
any part of the globe as suitable for human habitation, provided
that its laws were just and their administration impartial; a man of
taste was one who knew that standards of proportion and beauty in

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architecture and sculpture and painting had been fixed forever by
classic precedent. The living tissue of customs and traditions, the
vernacular architecture, the folkways and the folk-tales, the vulgar
languages and dialects that were spoken outside Paris and London —
all these things were looked upon by the eighteenth century gentleman
as a mass of follies and barbarisms. Enlightenment and progress
meant the spreading of London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, and
St. Petersburg over wider and wider areas.

Thanks to the dominance of the machine, to books and bayonets,
to printed calicos and missionary pocket-handkerchiefs, to brumma-
gem jewelry and cutlery and beads, a layer of this civilization began
to spread like a film of oil over the planet at large: machine tex-
tiles supplanted hand-woven ones, aniline dyes eventually took the
place of vegetable dyes locally made, and even in distant Polynesia
calico dresses and stove-pipe hats and shame covered up the proud
bodies of the natives, while syphilis and rum, introduced at the same
time as the Bible, added a special physical horror to their degrada-
tion. Wherever this film of oil spread, the living fish were poisoned
and their bloated bodies rose to the surface of the water, adding
their own decay to the stench of the oil itself. The new mechanical
civilization respected neither place nor past. In the reaction that it
provoked place and past were the two aspects of existence that were
over-stressed.

This reaction appeared definitely in the eighteenth century, just
at the moment that the paleotechnic revolution was getting under way.
It began as an attempt to take up the old threads of life at the point
where the Renascence had dropped them: it was thus a return to
the Middle Ages and a re-reading of their significance, absurdly by
Walpole, coldly by Robert Adam, graphically by Scott, faithfully
by von Scheffel, esthetically by Goethe and Blake, piously by Pugin
and the members of the Oxford movement, moralistically by Carlyle
and Ruskin, imaginatively by Victor Hugo. These poets and architects
and critics disclosed once more the wealth and interest of the old
local life in Europe: they showed how much engineering had lost
by deserting gothic forms for the simpler post and lintel construction
of classic architecture, and how much literature had forfeited by

290 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

its extravagant interest in classic forms and themes and its snobbish
parade of classic allusions, while the most poignant emotions were
embodied in the local ballads that still lingered on in the countryside.

By this “gothic” revival a slight check was placed upon the cen-
tralizing, exploitative, and de-regionalizing processes of the machine
civilization. Local folk lore and local fairy tales were collected by
scholars like the Brothers Grimm and historically minded novelists
like Scott; local monuments of archaeology were preserved, and the
glorious stained glass and wall paintings of the medieval and early
Renascence churches were saved here and there from the glazier
and plasterer, still erasing these remnants of “gothic barbarity” in
the name of progress and good taste. Local legends were collected:
indeed, one of the most remarkable poems of the romantic move-
ment, Tam O’Shanter, was written merely to serve as letterpress for
a picture of Alloway’s auld haunted kirk. Most potent of all, local
languages and dialects were pounced upon, in the very act of dying,
and restored to life by turning them to literary uses.

The nationalist movement took advantage of these new cultural
interests and attempted to use them for the purpose of fortifying the
political power of the unified nationalist state, that mighty engine
for preserving the economic status quo and for carrying out imperial-
istic policies of aggression among the weaker races. In this manner,
amorphous entities like Germany and Italy became self-conscious
and realized a certain degree of political self-sufiiciency. But the
new interests and revivals struck much deeper than political national-
ism, and were more concentrated in their sphere of action: moreover,
they touched aspects of life to which a mere power politics was as in-
different as was a power economics. The creation of nationalist states
was essentially a movement of protest against alien political powers,
wielded without the consent and participation of the governed: a
protest against the largely arbitrary political groupings of the dynas-
tic period. But the nations, once they achieved independent na-
tionality, speedily began with the introduction of coal-industrialism
to go through the same process of de-regionalization as those that
had had no separate national existence; and it was only with the

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 291

growth of a more intensive and self-conscious regionalism that the
process began to work in the opposite direction.

The revival of place interests and language interests, focussed
in the new appreciation of regional history, is one of the definite
characteristics of nineteenth century culture. Because it was in direct
conflict with the cosmopolitan free-trade imperialism of the leading
economic thought of the period — and political economy had a hal-
lowed status among the social sciences during this period, because
of its useful mythological character — ^this new regionalism was
never carefully appraised or sufficiently appreciated in the early
days of its existence. Even now it is still often looked upon as a
queer aberration: for plainly it does not fit in altogether with the
doctrines of industrial world-conquest or with those of ^^progress.”
The movement did not in fact crystallize, despite the valuable pre-
liminary work of the romantics, until the middle of the nineteenth
century; and instead of disappearing with the more universal triumph
of the machine it went on after that with accelerating speed and in-
tensity. First France: then Denmark: now every part of the world
has felt at least a tremor of the countering shock of regionalism,
sometimes a definite upheaval.

At the beginning, the main impulse came from the historic regions
whose existence was threatened by the mechanical and political
unifications of the nineteenth century. The movement had indeed a
definite beginning in time, namely 1854; in that year occurred the
first meeting of the Felibrigistes, who gathered together for the pur-
pose of restoring the language and the autonomous cultural life of
Provence. The Provengal language had all but been destroyed by
the Albigensian crusades: Provence had been, so to say, a conquered
province of the Church, which had decimated it by a strenuous use
of the secular arm; and although an attempt had been made by the
Seven Poets of Toulouse, in 1324, to revive the language, the move-
ment had not succeeded: the speech of Ronsard and Racine had
finally prevailed. In their consciousness of the part played by lan-
guage as a means of establishing and helping to build up their
identity with their region, a group of literary men, headed by
Frederic Mistral, started to institute the regionalist movement.

292 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

This movement has gone through a similar set of stages in every
country where it has taken place: in Denmark, in Norway, in Ireland,
in Catalonia, in Brittany, in Wales, in Scotland, in Palestine, and
similar signs are already visible in various regions in North America.
There is, as M. Jourdanne has put it, at first a poetic cycle: this
leads to the recovery of the language and literature of the folk, and
the attempt to use it as a vehicle for contemporary expression on
the basis of largely traditional forms. The second is the cycle of
prose, in which the interest in the language leads to an interest in
the totality of a community’s life and history, and so brings the
movement directly onto the contemporary stage. And finally there is
the cycle of action, in which regionalism forms for itself fresh objec-
tives, political, economic, civic, cultural, on the basis, not of a
servile restoration of the past, but of a growing integration of the
new forces that have attached themselves to the main trunk of tradi-
tion. The only places where regionalism has not been militantly self-
conscious are places like the cities and provinces of Germany in
which — ^until the recent centralization of power by the Totalitarian
State — an autonomous and effective local life had never entirely
disappeared.

The besetting weakness of regionalism lies in the fact that it is in
part a blind reaction against outward circumstances and disruptions,
an attempt to find refuge within an old shell against the turbulent
invasions of the outside world, armed with its new engines: in short,
an aversion from what is, rather than an impulse toward what may
be. For the merely sentimental regionalist, the past was an absolute.
His impulse was to fix some definite moment in the past, and to keep
on living it over and over again, holding the “original” regional
costumes, which were in fact merely the fashion of a certain century,
maintaining the regional forms of architecture, which were merely
the most convenient and comely constructions at a certain moment
of cultural and technical development; and he sought, more or less,
to keep these “original” customs and habits and interests fixed forever
in the same mould: a neurotic retreat. In that sense regionalism, it
seems plain, was anti-historical and anti-organic: for it denied both

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 293

the fact of change and the possibility that anything of value could
come out of it.

While it would be dishonest to gloss over this weakness^ one must
understand it in terms of the circumstances that conspired to produce
it. It was a flat reaction against the equally exaggerated neglect of the
traditions and historic monuments of a community’s life, fostered
by the abstractly progressive minds of the nineteenth century. For
the new industrialist, ^‘‘history was bunk.” Is it any wonder that the
new regionalist overcompensated for that contempt and ignorance by
holding that even the dustiest relics of the past were sacred? What
was mistaken was not the interest but the tactics. Vis-a-vis the ma-
chine, the regionalist was in the position of a swimmer facing a
strong incoming tide: if he attempts to stand up against the high
waves he is knocked down: if he seeks safety by retreating unaided
to the shore, he is caught in the undertow of the receding wave and
can neither reach land nor keep his footing: his welfare depends
upon his confidence in meeting the wave and plunging along with it
at the moment it is about to break, thus utilizing the energy of the
very force he is attempting to escape. These were the tactics of
Bishop Grundtvig of Denmark, who not merely revived the old
ballads but founded the cooperative agricultural movement: they
are the basis of a dynamic regionalism.

The fact is, at all events, that the development of local languages
and regional cultures, though springing immediately perhaps out
of a reactionary impulse, was not limited to negations, neither was
it hopelessly remote from those currents of modern life which
strengthen the bonds between regions and universalize the common
benefits of Western Civilization: it was rather complementary to
them. A world that is united physically by the airplane, the radio,
the cable, must eventually, if cooperation is to increase, devise a
common language to take care of all its practical matters — its news
despatches, its business communications, its international broadcasts,
and the relatively simple needs and curiosities of travellers. Pre-
cisely as the boundaries of mechanical intercourse widen and become
worldwide, a universal language must supplant the tongue of even
the most influential national aggregation. From this point of view,

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

one of the worst blows to internationalism was that struck by the
pedants of the Renascence when in their worship of the classics they
abandoned scholastic Latin, the universal language of the learned
classes.

But along with this pragmatic development of a common tongue
a more intimate language is needed for the deeper sort of coopera-
tion and commimication. Languages equipped for this special cul-
tural purpose have been spontaneously growing up or reviving all
over the Western World from the middle of the nineteenth century
onwards. Welsh, Gaelic, Hebrew, Catalan, Flemish, Czech, Nor-
wegian, Landsmaal, Africaans are some of the languages that are
either new, or have been renovated and popularized recently for
combined vernacular and literary use. While the growth of travel
and communication will doubtless lead to a consolidation of dialects,
reducing, say, the three hundred odd languages of India to a handful
of major languages, it is already being counteracted by the opposite
process of re-differentiation: the gap between English and American
is much wider now than it was when Noah Webster codified the
slightly more archaic American forms and pronunciations.

There is no reason to think that any single national language can
now dominate the world, as the French and the English people have
by turns dreamed : for unless an international language can be made
relatively fixed and lifeless, it will go through a babel-like differen-
tiation in precisely the same fashion as Latin did. It is much more
likely that bi-lingualism will become universal — ^that is, an arranged
and purely artificial world-language for pragmatic and scientific
uses, and a cultural language for local communication.

The revival of these cultural languages and literatures and the
stimulation of local life that has resulted from their use, must be
counted as one of the most effective measures society has taken for
protection against the automatic processes of machine civilization.
Against the dream of imiversal and complete standardization, the
dream of the universal cockney, and of one long street, called the
Tottenham Court Road or Broadway threading over the globe, and of
one language spoken ever3rwhere and on all occasions — against this
now archaic dream one must place the fact of cultural re-individua-

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tion. While the reaction has often been blind and arbitrary, it has
been no more so than the equally “forward-looking” movements it
was attempting to halt. Behind it lies the human need to control the
machine, if not at the point of origin, then at the point of application.

8: The Return to Nature

The historical revival of regionalism was re-enforced by another
movement: the Return to Nature.

The cultivation of nature for its own sake, and the pursuit of
rural modes of living and the appreciation of the rural environment
became in the eighteenth century one of the chief means of escaping
the counting house and the machine. So long as the country was
uppermost, the cult of nature could have no meaning: being a part
of life, there was no need to make it a special object of thought. It
was only when the townsman found himself closed in by his methodi-
cal urban routine and deprived in his new urban environment of
the sight of sky and grass and trees, that the value of the country
manifested itself clearly to him. Before this, an occasional rare
adventurer would seek the solitude of the mountains to cultivate his
soul: but in the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau, preaching
the wisdom of the peasant and the sanity of the simple rural occupa-
tions, led a whole succession of generations outside the gates of their
cities: they botanized, they climbed mountains, they sang peasant
songs, they swam in the moonlight, they helped in the harvest field;
and those who could afford to built themselves rural retreats. This
impulse to recapture nature had a powerful influence upon the culti-
vation of the environment as a whole and upon the development of
cities: but I reserve this for discussion in another book.

The important thing is to realize that at the very moment life
was becoming more constricted and routinized, a great safety valve
for the aboriginal human impulses had been found — ^the raw, imex-
plored, and relatively uncultivated regions of America and Africa,
and even the less formidable islands of the South Seas: above all,
the most steadfast of primitive environments, the ocean, had been
thrown open to the discontented and the adventurous. Failing to
accept the destiny that the inventors and the industrialists were

296 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

creating, failing to welcome the comforts and the conveniences of
civilized existence and accept the high value placed upon them by
the reigning bourgeoisie, those who possessed hardier virtues and
a quicker sense of values could escape from the machine. In the
forests and grasslands of the new worlds they could wring a living
from the soil, and on the sea they could face the elemental forces of
wind and water. Here, likewise, those too weak to face the machine
could find temporary refuge.

This solution was perhaps almost a too perfect one; for the new
settlers and pioneers not merely satisfied their own spiritual needs
by colonizing the less inhabited areas of the globe, but in the act
of so doing they provided raw materials for the new industries,
they likewise afforded a market for their manufactured goods, and
they paved the way for the eventual introduction of the machine.
Rarely have the inner impulses of different parts of society balanced
so neatly with the outer conditions of its success: rarely has there
been a social situation which was satisfactory to so many different
types of personality and so many varieties of human effort. For a
brief hundred years — roughly from 1790 to 1890 in North America,
and perhaps a little earlier and a little later for South America and
Africa — ^the land pioneer and the industrial pioneer were in close
partnership. The thrifty, aggressive, routinized men built their fac-
tories and regimented their workers: the tough, sanguine, spirited,
non-mechanical men fought the aborigines, cleared the land, scoured
the forests for game and clove the virgin soils with their plows. If
the new agricultural opportunities were still too tame and respectable,
even though old customs and solidarities were disregarded and old
precedents flouted, there were horses to be roped on the pampas,
petroleum to be tapt in Pennsylvania, gold was to be found in
California and Australia, rubber and tea to be planted in the East,
and virgin lands in the steaming heart of Africa or in the coldest north
could be trodden for the first time by white men, seeking food or
knowledge or adventure or psychal remoteness from their own kind.

Not until the new lands were completely occupied and exploited
did the machine come in, to claim its special form of dominion over
those who had shown neither courage nor luck nor cunning in exploit-

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 297

ing Nature. For millions of men and women, the new lands staved off
the moment of submission. By accepting the shackles of nature they
could evade for a brief while the complicated interdependence of
the machine civilization. The more humane or fanatic types, in the
company of their fellows, could even make an equally brief effort
to realize their dream of the perfect society or the Heavenly City:
from the Shaker colonies in New England to the Mormons of Utah
there stretched a weak faint line of perfectionists, seeking to circum-
vent both the aimless brutality of nature and the more purposeful
brutality of man.

Movements as vast and complex as the migration of peoples from
the seventeenth to the twentieth century cannot of course be accounted
for by a single cause or a single set of circumstances. The pressure
of population-growth by itself is not sufficient to explain it, for not
merely did the movement precede the growth, but the fact is that this
pressure was considerably eased in Europe by the introduction of
the potato, the improvement of the winter cattle fodder crops and the
overthrow of the three-field system, at the very moment that the
exodus to the new world was greatly accelerated. Nor can it be ex-
plained on purely political terms as an attempt to escape obsolete
ecclesiastical and political institutions, or a result of the desire to
breathe the free unpolluted air of republican institutions. Nor again
was it merely a practical working out of the desire to return to
Nature, although Rousseau had plainly influenced people who talked
Rousseau and acted Rousseau without ever perhaps having heard his
name. But all these motives were in existence: the desire to be free
from social compulsion, the desire for economic security, the desire
to return to nature; and they played into each other’s hands. They
provided both the excuse and the motive power for escaping from
the new mechanical civilization that was closing in upon the Western
World. To shoot, to trap, to chop trees, to hold a plow, to prospect,
to face a seam — all these primitive occupations, out of which technics
had originally sprung, all these occupations that had been closed
and stabilized by the very advances of technics, were now open to
the pioneer: he might be hunter, fisher, miner, woodman, and farmer
by turn, and by engaging in these occupations people could restore

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

their plain animal vigor as men and women, temporarily freed from
the duties of a more orderly and servile existence.

Within a short century this savage idyll practically came to an
end. The industrial pioneer caught up with the land pioneer and the
latter could only rehearse in play what his forefathers had done out
of sheer necessity. But as long as the opportunities were open in the
unsettled countries, people took advantage of them in numbers that
would be astounding if the blessings of an orderly, acquisitive, me-
chanized civilization were as great as the advocates of Progress
believed and preached. Millions of people chose a lifetime of danger,
heroic toil, deprivation and hardships, battling with the forces of
Nature, rather than accept life on the terms that it was ofEered alike
to the victorious and the vanquished in the new hives of industry.
The movement was in part the reverse of that great organizing effort
of the eleventh and twelfth centuries which cleared the forests and
marshes and erected cities from one end of Europe to the other: it
was rather a tendency to disperse, to escape from a close, systematic,
cultivated life into an open and relatively barbarous existence.

With the occupation of the remaining open lands, this modern
movement of population tapered off, and our mechanical civilization
lost one of its main safety valves. The most simple human reaction
that fear of the machine could provoke — running away from it — had
ceased to be possible without undermining the basis of livelihood.
So complete has the victory of the machine been during the last gen-
eration that in the periodic exodus from the machine which takes
place on holidays in America the would-be exiles escape in motor cars
and carry into the wilderness a phonograph or a radio set. And ulti-
mately, then, the reaction of the pioneer was far less effective, though
it so soon found practical channels, than the romanticism of the poets
and architects and painters who merely created in the mind the ideal
image of a more humane life.

Yet the lure of more primitive conditions of life, as an alternative
to the machine, remains. Some of those who shrink from the degree of
social control necessary to operate the machine rationally, are now
busy with plans for scrapping the machine and returning to a bare
subsistence level in little island utopias devoted to sub-agriculture

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 299

and sub-manufacture. The advocates of these measures for returning
to the primitive forget only one fact: what they are proposing is not
an adventure but a bedraggled retreat, not a release but a confession
of complete failure. They propose to return to the physical conditions
of pioneer existence without the positive spiritual impulse that made
the original conditions tolerable and the original efforts possible. If
such defeatism becomes widespread it would mean something more
than the collapse of the machine: it would mean the end of the present
cycle of Western Civilization.

9: Organic and Mechanical Polarities

During the century and a half that followed Rousseau the cult of
the primitive took many forms. Joining up with historical romanti-
cism, which had other roots, it expressed itself on the imaginative
level as an interest in the folk arts and in the products of primitive
people, no longer dismissed as crude and barbarous, but valued
precisely for these qualities, which were often conspicuously lacking
in more highly developed communities. Not by accident was the in-
terest in the art of the African negroes, one of the manifestations of
this cult in our century, the product of the same group of Parisian
painters who accepted with utmost heartiness the new forms of the
machine: Congo maintained the balance against the motor works
and the subway.

But on the wider platform of personal behavior, the primitive
disclosed itself during the twentieth century in the insurgence of sex.
The erotic dances of the Polynesians, the erotic music of the African
negro tribes, these captured the imagination and presided over the
recreation of the mechanically disciplined urban masses of Western
Civilization, reaching their swiftest development in the United States,
the country that had most insistently fostered mechanical gadgets
and mechanical routines. To the once dominantly masculine relax-
ation of drunkenness was added the hetero-sexual relaxation of the
dance and the erotic embrace, two phases of the sexual act that were
now performed in public. The reaction grew in proportion to the ex-
ternal restraint imposed by the day’s grind; but instead of enriching
the erotic life and providing deep organic satisfactions, these com-

300 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

pensatory measures tended to keep sex at a constant pitch of stimula*
tion and ultimately of irritation: for the ritual of sexual excitation
pervaded not merely recreation but business : it appeared in the oflBce
and the advertisement, to remind and to tantalize without providing
sufficient occasions for active release.

The distinction between sexual expression as one of the modes of
life and sex as a compensating element in a monotonous and re-
stricted existence must not be lost, even though it be difficult to define.
For sex, I need hardly say, manifested itself in both forms during
this period, and with the positive side of this development and its
many fruitful and far-reaching consequences, I purpose to deal at
length in another place. But in its extreme forms, the compensatory
element could easily be detected: for it was marked by an abstract-
ness and a remoteness, derived from the very environment that the
populace was desperately trying to escape. The weakness of these
primitive compensations disclosed itself in the usually synthetic
obscenities of the popular joke, the remote glamor of the embraces
of moving picture stars, the voluptuous contortions of dancers on the
stage and of experiences taken in at second or third hand through the
bawdy mimicry of the popular song or, a little closer to reality,
snatched hastily and furtively at the end of an automobile ride or a
fatiguing day in the office or the factory. Those who escaped the
anxiety and frustration of such embraces did so only by deadening
their higher nerve-centers by means of alcohol or by the chemistry
of some form of psychal anesthesia which took the outward form of
coarseness and debasement.

In brief, most of the sexual compensations were little above the
level of abject fantasy; whereas when sex is accepted as an important
mode of life, lovers reject these weak and secondary substitutes for
it, and devote their minds and energies to courtship and expression
themselves: necessary steps to those enlargements and enrichments
and sublimations of sex that alike maintain the species and energize
the entire cultural heritage. It was a miner’s son, D. H. Lawrence,
who distinguished most sharply between the degradation of sex which
occurs when it is merely a means of getting away from the sordid
environment and oppressive dullness of a low-grade industrial town.

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COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

and the exhilaration that arises when sex is genuinely respected and
celebrated in its own right.

The weakness of the sexual relapse into the primitive was not
indeed unlike that which overtook the more general cultivation of the
body through sport. The impulse that excited it was genuine and
justified; but the form it took did not lead to a transformation of
the original condition: rather, it became the mechanism by means of
which the original condition was remedied sufficiently to continue
in existence. Sex had a larger part of life to claim than it filched for
itself in the instinctive reaction against the machine.

As the machine tended toward the pole of regularity and com-
plete automatism, it became severed, finally, from the umbilical cord
that bound it to the bodies of men and women: it became an absolute.
That was the danger Samuel Butler jestingly prophesied in Erewhon,
the danger that the human being might become a means whereby
the machine perpetuated itself and extended its dominion. The recoil
from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute
of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced
to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their
position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset
by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly
processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural devel-
opments — even those developments that most closely derive from the
organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn
from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had
nothing to learn from mechanism. On one side is the gigantic print-
ing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid
newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself,
symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emo-
tion, feeling, barely vestigial thought. Here the impersonal and the
cooperative and the objective: over against it the limited, the sub-
jective, the recalcitrant, violent ego, full of hatreds, fears, blind
frenzies, crude impulses toward destruction. Mechanical instruments,
potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a
blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deed%
of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.

302 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

The effect of this return to the absolute primitive, like so many
other neurotic adaptations that temporarily bridge the chasm, devel-
ops stresses of its own which tend to push the two sides of existence
still further apart. That hiatus limits the efficiency of the compensa-
tory reaction: ultimately it spells ruin for the civilization that seeks
to maintain the raw mechanical by weighting it with the raw. prim-
itive. For in its broadest reaches, including all those cultural interests
and sentiments and admirations which sustain the work of the sci-
entist, the technician, the artist, the philosopher, even when they do
not appear directly in the particular work itself — in its broadest
reaches this civilization cannot be run by barbarians. A hairy ape
in the stokehold is a grave danger signal: a hairy ape on the bridge
means speedy shipwreck. The appearance of such apes, in the forms
of those political dictators who attempt to accomplish by calculated
brutality and aggression what they lack the intelligence and mag-
nanimity to consummate by more humane direction, indicates on what
an infirm and treacherous foundation the machine at present rests.
For, more disastrous than any mere physical destruction of machines
by the barbarian is his threat to turn off or divert the human motive
power, discouraging the cooperative processes of thought and the
disinterested research which are responsible for our major technical
achievements.

Toward the end of his life Herbert Spencer viewed with proper
alarm the regression into imperialism, militarism, servility that he
saw all around him at the beginning of the present century; and in
truth he had every reason for his forebodings. But the point is that
these forces were not merely archaic survivals that had failed to be
extirpated by the machine: they were rather underlying human ele-
ments awakened into stertorous activity by the very victory of the
machine as an absolute and non-conditioned force in human life.
The machine, by failing as yet — despite neotechnic advances — ^to
allow sufficient play in social existence to the organic, has opened the
way for its return in the narrow and inimical form of the primitive.
Western society is relapsing at critical points into pre-civilized
modes of thought, feeling, and action because it has acquiesced too
easily in the dehumanization of society through capitalist exploitation

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 303

and military conquest. The retreat into the primitive is, in sum, a
maudlin effort to avoid the more basic and infinitely more difficult
transformation which our thinkers and leaders and doers have lacked
the candor to face, the intelligence to contrive, and the will to effect —
the transition beyond the historic forms of capitalism and the equally
limited original forms of the machine to a life-centered economy.

10: Sport and the “Bitch-goddess”

The romantic movements were important as a corrective to the
machine because they called attention to essential elements in life
that were left out of the mechanical world-picture: they themselves
prepared some of the materials for a richer synthesis. But there is
within modern civilization a whole series of compensatory functions
that, so far from making better integration possible, only serve to
stabilize the existing state — and finally they themselves become part
of the very regimentation they exist to combat. The chief of these
institutions is perhaps mass-sports. One may define these sports as
those forms of organized play in which the spectator is more im-
portant than the player, and in which a good part of the meaning is
lost when the game is played for itself. Mass-sport is primarily a
spectacle.

Unlike play, mass-sport usually requires an element of mortal
chance or hazard as one of its main ingredients: but instead of the
chance’s occurring spontaneously, as in mountain climbing, it must
take place in accordance with the rules of the game and must be
increased when the spectacle begins to bore the spectators. Play in
one form or another is found in every human society and among
a great many animal species: but sport in the sense of a mass-spec-
tacle, with death to add to the underl3dng excitement, comes into
existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and
depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious partici-
pation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to
sustain its waning life-sense. The demand for circuses, and when
the milder spectacles are still insufficiently life-arousing, the demand
for sadistic exploits and finally for blood is characteristic of civiliza-
tions that are losing their grip: Rome under the Caesars, Mexico at

304 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the time of Montezuma, Germany xmder the Nazis. These forms of
surrogate manliness and bravado are the surest signs of a collective
impotence and a pervasive death wish. The dangerous symptoms of
that ultimate decay one finds everywhere today in machine civiliza-
tion imder the guise of mass-sport.

The invention of new forms of sport and the conversion of play
into sport were two of the distinctive marks of the last century: base-
ball is an example of the first, and the transformation of tennis and
golf into tournament spectacles, within our own day, is an example
of the second. Unlike play, sport has an existence in our mechanical
civilization even in its most abstract possible manifestation: the crowd
that does not witness the ball game will huddle around the score-
board in the metropolis to watch the change of coxmters. If it does
not see the aviator finish a record flight aroxmd the world, it will listen
over the radio to the report of his landing and hear the frantic shouts
of the mob on the field: should the hero attempt to avoid a public
reception and parade, he would be regarded as cheating. At times,
as in horse-racing, the elements may be reduced to names and betting
odds: participation need go no further than the newspaper and the
betting booth, provided that the element of chance be there. Since the
principal aim of our mechanical routine in industry is to reduce the
domain of chance, it is in the glorification of chance and the unex-
pected, which sport provides, that the element extruded by the ma-
chine returns, with an accumulated emotional charge, to life in
general. In the latest forms of mass-sport, like air races and motor
races, the thrill of the spectacle is intensified by the promise of
immediate death or fatal injury. The cry of horror that escapes from
the crowd when the motor car overturns or the airplane crashes is
not one of surprise but of fulfilled expectation: is it not fundamen-
tally for the sake of exciting just such bloodlust that the competition
itself is held and widely attended? By means of the talking picture
that spectacle and that thrill are repeated in a thousand theatres
throughout the world as a mere incident in the presentation of the
week’s news: so that a steady habituation to blood-letting and exhi-
bitionistic murder and suicide accompanies the spread of the machine
and, becoming stale by repetition in its milder forms, encourages

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 305

the demand for more massive and desperate exhibitions of brutality.

Sport presents three main elements: the spectacle, the competition,
and the personalities of the gladiators. The spectacle itself introduces
the esthetic element, so often lacking in the paleotechnic industrial
environment itself. The race is run or the game is played within a
frame of spectators, tightly massed: the movements of this mass, their
cries, their songs, their cheers, are a constant accompaniment of the
spectacle: they play, in effect, the part of the Greek chorus in the
new machine-drama, announcing what is about to occur and under-
lining the events of the contest. Through his place in the chorus, the
spectator finds his special release: usually cut off from close physical
associations by his impersonal routine, he is now at one with a primi-
tive undifferentiated group. His muscles contract or relax with the
progress of the game, his breath comes quick or slow, his shouts
heighten the excitement of the moment and increase his internal sense
of the drama: in moments of frenzy he pounds his neighbor’s back or
embraces him. The spectator feels himself contributing by his pres-
ence to the victory of his side, and sometimes, more by hostility
to the enemy than encouragement to the friend, he does perhaps
exercize a visible effect on the contest. It is a relief from the passive
role of taking orders and automatically filling them, of conforming
by means of a reduced to a magnified “It,” for in the sports
arena the spectator has the illusion of being completely mobilized
and utilized. Moreover, the spectacle itself is one of the richest satis-
factions for the esthetic sense that the machine civilization offers to
those that have no key to any other form of culture: the spectator
knows the style of his favorite contestants in the way that the painter
knows the characteristic line or palette of his master, and he reacts
to the bowler, the pitcher, the punter, the server, the air ace, with
a view, not only to his success in scoring, but to the esthetic spectacle
itself. This point has been stressed in bull-fighting; but of course it
applies to every form of sport. There remains, nevertheless, a conflict
between the desire for a skilled exhibition and the desire for a brutal
outcome: the maceration or death of one or more of the contestants.

Now in the competition two elements are in conflict: chance and
record-making. Chance is the sauce that stimulates the excitement

306 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of the spectator and increases his zest for gambling: whippet-racing
and horse-racing are as effective in this relation as games where a
greater degree of human skill is involved. But the habits of the
mechanical regime are as difficult to combat in sport as in the realm
of sexual behavior: hence one of the most significant elements in
modern sport is the fact that an abstract interest in record-making
has become one of its main preoccupations. To cut the fifth of a
second off the time of running a race, to swim the English channel
twenty minutes faster than another swimmer, to stay up in the air
an hour longer than one’s rival did — ^these interests come into the
competition and turn it from a purely human contest to one in which
the real opponent is the previous record: time takes the place of a
visible rival. Sometimes, as in dance marathons or flag-pole squat-
tings, the record goes to feats of inane endurance: the blankest and
dreariest of stib-human spectacles. With the increase in professional-
ized skill that accompanies this change, the element of chance is
further reduced: the sport, which was originally a drama, becomes
an exhibition. As soon as specialism reaches this point, the whole
performance is arranged as far as possible for the end of making
possible the victory of the popular favorite: the other contestants
are, so to say, thrown to the lions. Instead of “Fair Play” the rule
now becomes “Success at Any Price.”

Finally, in addition to the spectacle and the competition, there
comes onto the stage, further to differentiate sport from play, the
new type of popular hero, the professional player or sportsman. He
is as specialized for the vocation as a soldier or an opera singer: he
represents virility, courage, gameness, those talents in exercizing
and commanding the body which have so small a part in the new
mechanical regimen itself: if the hero is a girl, her qualities must
be Amazonian in character. The sports hero represents the masculine
virtues, the Mars complex, as the popular motion picture actress or
the bathing beauty contestant represents Venus. He exhibits that com-
plete skill to which the amateur vainly aspires. Instead of being
looked upon as a servile and ignoble being, because of the very
perfection of his physical efforts, as the Athenians in Socrates’ time
looked upon the professional athletes and dancers, this new hero

307

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

represents the summit of the amateur’s effort, not at pleasure but at
efficiency. The hero is handsomely paid for his efforts, as well as
being rewarded by praise and publicity, and he thus further restores
to sport its connection with the very commercialized existence from
which it is supposed to provide relief — ^restores it and thereby sancti-
fies it. TJie few heroes who resist this vulgarization — ^notably Lind-
bergh — fall into popular or at least into journalistic disfavor, for
they are only playing the less important part of the game. The really
successful sports hero, to satisfy the mass-demand, must be midway
between a pander and a prostitute.

Sport, then, in this mechanized society, is no longer a mere game
empty of any reward other than the playing: it is a profitable busi-
ness: millions are invested in arenas, equipment, and players, and
the maintenance of sport becomes as important as the maintenance
of any other form of profit-making mechanism. And the technique of
mass-sport infects other activities: scientific expeditions and geo-
graphic explorations are conducted in the manner of a speed stunt
or a prizefight — and for the same reason. Business or recreation or
mass spectacle, sport is always a means: even when it is reduced to
athletic and military exercizes held with great pomp within the sports
arenas, the aim is to gather a record-breaking crowd of performers
and spectators, and thus testify to the success or importance of the
movement that is represented. Thus sport, which began originally,
perhaps, as a spontaneous reaction against the machine, has become
one of the mass-duties of the machine age. It is a part of that uni-
versal regimentation of life — ^f or the sake of private profits or nation-
alistic exploit — from which its excitement provides a temporary and
only a superficial release. Sport has turned out, in short, to be one
of the least effective reactions against the machine. There is only one
other reaction less effective in its final result: the most ambitious as
well as the most disastrous. I mean war.

11: The Cult of Death

Conflict, of which war is a specialized institutional drama, is
a recurrent fact in human societies: it is indeed inevitable when
society has reached any degree of differentiation, because the absence

308 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of conflict would presume a unanimity that exists only in placentals
between embryos and their female parents. The desire to achieve
that kind of unity is one of the most patently regressive characteristics
of totalitarian states and other similar attempts at tyranny in smaller
groups.

But war is that special form of conflict in which the aim is not
to resolve the points of difference hut to annihilate physically the
defenders of opposing points or reduce them by force to submission.
And whereas conflict is an inevitable incident in any active system of
cooperation, to be welcomed just because of the salutary variations
and modifications it introduces, war is plainly a specialized perver-
sion of conflict, bequeathed perhaps by the more predatory hunting
groups; and it is no more an eternal and necessary phenomenon in
group life than is cannibalism or infanticide.

War differs in scale, in intention, in deadliness, and in frequency
with the type of society: it ranges all the way from the predominantly
ritualistic warfare of many primitive societies to the ferocious slaugh-
ters instituted from time to time by barbarian conquerors like
Ghengis Khan and the systematic combats between entire nations
that now occupy so much of the time and energy and attention of
‘‘^advanced” and ^^peacefuT’ industrial countries. The impulses
toward destruction have plainly not decreased with progress in the
means: indeed there is some reason to think that our original col-
lecting and food-gathering ancestors, before they had invented weap-
ons to aid them in hunting, were more peaceful in habit than their
more civilized descendants. As war has increased in destructiveness,
the sporting element has grown smaller. Legend tells of an ancient
conqueror who spurned to capture a town by surprise at night because
it would be too easy and would take away the glory: today a well-
organized army attempts to exterminate the enemy by artillery fire
before it advances to capture the position.

In almost all its manifestations, however, war indicates a throw-
back to an infantile psychal pattern on the part of people who can
no longer stand the exacting strain of life in groups, with all the
necessities for compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, under-
standing and sympathy that such life demands, and with all the com-

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 309

plexities of adjustment involved. They seek by the knife and the
gun to unravel the social knot. But whereas national wars today are
essentially collective competitions in which the battlefield takes the
place of the market, the ability of war to command the loyalty and
interests of the entire underlying population rests partly upon its
peculiar psychological reactions: it provides an outlet and an emo-
tional release. ^^Art degraded, imagination denied,’’ as Blake says,
^Var governed the nations.”

For war is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society;
and it has an element of advantage that puts it high above all the
other preparatory forms of mass-sport in which the attitudes of war
are mimicked: war is real, while in all the other mass-sports there
is an element of make-believe: apart from the excitements of the
game and the gains or losses from gambling, it does not really matter
who is victorious. In war, there is no doubt as to the reality: success
may bring the reward of death just as surely as failure, and it
may bring it to the remotest spectator as well as to the gladiators in
the center of the vast arena of the nations.

But war, for those actually engaged in combat, likewise brings
a release from the sordid motives of profit-making and self-seeking
that govern the prevailing forms of business enterprise, including
sport: the action has the significance of high drama. And while war-
fare is one of the principal sources of mechanism, and its drill
and regimentation are the very pattern of old-style industrial effort,
it provides, far more than the sport-field, the necessary compensations
to this routine. The preparation of the soldier, the parade, the smart-
ness and polish of the equipment and uniform, the precise movement
of large bodies of men, the blare of bugles, the punctuation of drums,
the rhythm of the march, and then, in actual battle itself, the final
explosion of effort in the bombardment and the charge, lend an
esthetic and moral grandeur to the whole performance. The death
or maiming of the body gives the drama the element of a tragic
sacrifice, like that which underlies so many primitive religious
rituals: the effort is sanctified and intensified by the scale of the
holocaust. For peoples that have lost the values of culture and can
no longer respond with interest or understanding to the symbols of

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

culture, the abandon m ent of the whole process and the reversion to
crude faiths and non-rational dogmas, is powerfully abetted by the
processes of war. If no enemy really existed, it would be necessary
to create him, in order to further this development.

Thus war breaks the tedium of a mechanized society and relieves
it from the pettiness and prudence of its daily efforts, by concentrat-
ing to their last degree both the mechanization of the means of
production and the countering vigor of desperate vital outbursts.
"War sanctions the utmost exhibition of the primitive at the same
time that it deifies the mechanical. In modern war, the raw primitive
and the clockwork mechanical are one.

In view of its end products — the dead, the crippled, the insane,
the devastated regions, the shattered resources, the moral corruption,
the anti-social hates and hoodlumisms — ^war is the most disastrous
outlet for the repressed impulses of society that has been devised.
The evil consequences have increased in magnitude and in human
distress in proportion as the actual elements of fighting have become
more mechanized: the threat of chemical warfare against the civilian
population as well as the military arm places in the hands of the
armies of the world instruments of ruthlessness of which only the
most savage conquerors in the past would have taken advantage. The
difference between the Athenians with their swords and shields fight-
ing on the fields of Marathon, and the soldiers who faced each other
with tanks, guns, flame-throwers, poison gases, and hand-grenades
on the Western Front, is the difference between the ritual of the dance
and the routine of the slaughter house. One is an exhibition of skill
and courage with the chance of death present, the other is an ex-
hibition of the arts of death, with the almost accidental by-product
of skill and courage. But it is in death that these repressed and regi-
mented populations have their first glimpse of effective life ; and the
cult of death is a sign of their throwback to the corrupt primitive.

As a back-fire against mechanism, war, even more than mass-sport,
has increased the area of the conflagration without stemming its ad-
vance. Still, as long as the machine remains an absolute, war will
represent for this society the sum of its values and compensations:
for war brings people back to the earth, makes them face the battle

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COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

■with the elements, unleashes the brute forces of their own nature,
releases the normal restraints of social life, and sanctions a return
to the primitive in thought and feeling, even as it further sanctions
infantility in the blind personal obedience it exacts, like that of the
archetypal father with the archetypal son, which divests the latter of
the need of behaving like a responsible and autonomous personal-
ity. Savagery, which we have associated with the not-yet-civilized, is
equally a reversionary mode that arises with the mechanically over-
civilized. Sometimes the mechanism against which reaction takes
place is a compulsive morality or social regimentation: in the case of
Western peoples it is the too-closely regimented environment we asso-
ciate with the machine. War, like a neurosis, is the destructive solu-
tion of an unbearable tension and conflict between organic impulses
and the code and circumstances that keep one from satisfying them.

This destructive union of the mechanized and the savage primitive
is the alternative to a mature, humanized culture capable of directing
the machine to the enhancement of communal and personal life. If
our life were an organic whole this split and this perversion would
not be possible, for the order we have embodied in machines would
be more completely exemplified in our personal life, and the prim-
itive impulses, which we have diverted or repressed by excessive
preoccupation with mechanical devices, would have natural outlets
in their appropriate cultural forms. Until we begin to achieve this
culture, however, war will probably remain the constant shadow of
the machine: the wars of national armies, the wars of gangs, the
wars of classes: beneath all, the incessant preparation by drill and
propaganda towards these wars. A society that has lost its life values
will tend to make a religion of death and build up a cult around its
worship — a religion not less grateful because it satisfies the mounting
number of paranoiacs and sadists such a disrupted society necessarily
produces.

12: The Minor Shock-Absorbers

From all the forms of resistance and compensation we have been
examining it is plain that the introduction of die machine was not
smooth, nor were its characteristic habits of life undisputed. The

312 * TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

reactions would probably have been more numerous and more de*
cisive had it not been for the fact that old habits of thought and old
ways of life continued in existence: this bridged the gap between the
old and the new, and kept the machine from dominating life as a
whole as much as it controlled the routine of industrial activity.
In part, these existing institutions, while they stabilized society, pre-
vented it from absorbing and reacting upon the cultural elements
derived from the machine: so that they lessened the valuable offices
of the machine in the act of mitigating its defects.

In addition to the stabilizing inertia of society as a whole, and to
the many-sided attempts to combat the machine by the force of ideas
and institutional contrivances, there were still' other reactions that
served, as it were, as cushions and shock-absorbers. So far from
stopping the machine or undermining the purely mechanical pro-
gram, they perhaps decreased the tensions that the machine produced.
Thus the tendency to destroy the memorials of older cultures, ex-
hibited by the utilitarians in their first vigor of self-confidence and
creative effort, was met in part among the very classes that were most
active in this attack, by the cult of antiguarianism.

This cult lacked the passionate conviction that one period or an-
other of the past was of supreme value: it merely held that almost
anything old was ipso facto valuable or beautiful, whether it was
a fragment of Roman statuary, a wooden image of a fifteenth century
saint, or an iron door knocker. The exponents of this cult attempted
to create private environments from which every hint of the machine
was absent: they burned wooden logs in the open fireplaces of imita-
tion Norman manor houses, which were in reality heated by steam,
designed with the help of a camera and measured drawings, and
supported, where the architect was a little uncertain of his skill
or materials, with concealed steel beams. When handicraft articles
could not be filched from the decayed buildings of the past, they
were copied with vast effort by belated handworkers: when the de-
mand for such copies filtered down through the middle classes, they
were then reproduced by means of power machinery in a fashion
capable of deceiving only the blind and ignorant: a double prevari-
cation.

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 313

Oppressed by a mechanical environment they had neither mastered
nor humanized nor succeeded esthetically in appreciating, the ruling
classes and their imitators among the lesser bourgeoisie retreated
from the factory or the ojGace into a fake non-mechanical environment,
in which the past was modified by the addition of physical comforts,
such as tropical temperature in the winter, and springs and padding
on sofas, lounges, beds. Each successful individual produced his own
special antiquarian environment: a private world.

This private world, as lived in Suburbia or in the more palatial
country houses, is not to be differentiated by any objective standard
from the world in which the lunatic attempts to live out the drama in
which he appears to himself to be Lorenzo the Magnificent or
Louis XIV. In each case the difficulty of maintaining an equilibrium
in relation to a difficult or hostile external world is solved by with-
drawal, permanent or temporary, into a private retreat, untainted
by most of the conditions that public life and effort lay down. These
antiquarian stage-settings, which characterized for the most part the
domestic equipment of the more successful members of the bour-
geoisie from the eighteenth century onward — ^with a minor interlude
of self-confident ugliness during the high paleotechnic period —
these stage-settings were, on a strict psychological interpretation,
cells: indeed, the addition of ^^comforts” made them padded cells.
Those who lived in them were stable, ‘^^normal,” ^'^adjusted” people.
In relation to the entire environment in which they worked and
thought and lived, they merely behaved as if they were in a state of
neurotic collapse, as if there were a deep conflict between their inner
drive and the mechanical environment they had helped to create,
as if they had been unable to resolve their divided activities into a
single consistent pattern.

The other side of this conservatism of taste and this refusal to
recognize natural change was the tendency to take refuge in change
for its own sake, and to hasten the very process that was introduced
by the machine. Changing the style of an object, altering its super-
ficial shape or color, without effecting any real improvement, became
part of the routine of modern society just because the natural varia-
tions and breaks in life were absent: the answer to excessive regi-

314 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

mentation came in through an equally heightened and over-stimulated
demand for novelties. In the long run, imceasing change is as monot-
onous as unceasing sameness: real refreshment implies both uncer-
tainty and choice, and to have to abandon choice merely because
for external reasons a style has changed is to forfeit what real gain
has been made. Here again change and novelty are no more sacred,
no more inimical, than stability and monotony: but the purposeless
materialism and imbecile regimentation of production resulted in the
aimless change and the absence of real stimuli and efEective adjust-
ments in consumption; and so far from resolving the difficulty the
resistance only increased it. The itch for change: the itch for move-
ment: the itch for novelty infected the entire system of production
and consumption and severed them from the real standards and
norms which it was highly important to devise. When people’s work
and days were varied they were content to remain in the same place;
when their lives were ironed out into a blank routine they found it
necessary to move; and the more rapidly they moved the more
standardized became the environment in which they moved: there
was no getting away from it. So it went in every department of life.

Where the physical means of withdrawal were inadequate, pure
fantasy flourished without any other external means than the word
or the picture. But these external means were put upon a mechanized
collective basis during the nineteenth century, as a result of the cheap-
ened processes of production made possible by the rotary press, the
camera, photo-engraving, and the motion picture. With the spread of
literacy, literature of all grades and levels formed a semi-public
world into which the unsatisfied individual might withdraw, to live a
life of adventure following the travellers and explorers in their
memoirs, to live a life of dangerous action and keen observation by
participating in the crimes and investigations of a Dupin or a Sher-
lock Holmes, or to live a life of romantic fulfillment in the love stories
and erotic romances that became everyone’s property from the eight-
eenth century onward. Most of these varieties of day-dream and pri-
vate fantasy had of course existed in the past: now they became part
of a gigantic collective apparatus of escape. So important was the
fimction of popular literature as escape that many modern psychol-

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 315

ogists have treated literature as a whole as a mere vehicle of with-
drawal from the harsh realities of existence: forgetful of the fact
that literature of the first order, so far from being a mere pleasure-
device, is a supreme attempt to face and encompass reality — an at-
tempt beside which a busy working life involves a shrinkage and
represents a partial retreat.

During the nineteenth century vulgar literature to a large extent
replaced the mythological constructions of religion: the austere cos-
mical sweep and the careful moral codes of the more sacred religions
were, alas! a little too much akin to the machine itself, from which
people were trying to escape. This withdrawal into fantasy was im-
mensely re-enforced from 1910 on, by the motion-picture, which
came into existence just when the pressure from the machine was
beginning to bear down more and more inexorably. Public day-
dreams of wealth, magnificence, adventure, irregularity and spon-
taneous action — identification with the criminal defying the forces of
order — identification with the courtesan practicing openly the allure-
ments of sex — ^these scarcely adolescent fantasies, created and pro-
jected with the aid of the machine, made the machine-ritual tolerable
to the vast urban or urbanized populations of the world. But these
dreams were no longer private, and what is more they were no
longer spontaneous and free: they were promptly capitalized on a
vast scale as the ^‘amusement business,” and established as a vested
interest. To create a more liberal life that might do without such
anodynes was to threaten the safety of investments, built on the cer-
tainty of continued dullness, boredom and defeat.

Too dull to think, people might read: too tired to read, they might
look at the moving pictures: unable to visit the picture theater they
might turn on the radio: in any case, they might avoid the call to
action: surrogate lovers, surrogate heroes and heroines, surrogate
wealth filled their debilitated and impoverished lives and carried the
perfume of unreality into their dwellings. And as the machine itself
became, as it were, more active and human, reproducing the organic
properties of eye and ear, the human beings who employed the
machine as a mode of escape have tended to become more passive
and mechanical. Unsure of their own voices, unable to hold a tune.

316 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

they carry a phonograph or a radio set with them even on a picnic:
afraid to be alone with their own thoughts, afraid to confront the
blankness and inertia of their own minds, they turn on the radio and
eat and talk and sleep to the accompaniment of a continuous stimulus
from the outside world: now a band, now a bit of propaganda, now
a piece of public gossip called news. Even such autonomy as the
poorest drudge once had, left like Cinderella to her dreams of Prince
Charming when her sisters went off to the ball, is gone in this mechan-
ical environment: whatever compensations her present-day counter-
part may have, it must come through the machine. Using the machine
alone to escape from the machine, our mechanized populations have
jumped from a hot frying pan into a hotter fire. The shock-absorbers
are of the same order as the environment itself. The moving picture
deliberately glorifies the cold brutality and homicidal lusts of
gangsterdom: the newsreel prepares for battles to come by exhibiting
each week the latest devices of armed combat, accompanied by a few
persuasive bars from the national anthem. In the act of relieving
psychological strain these various devices only increase the final ten-
sion and support more disastrous forms of release. After one has
lived through a thousand callous deaths on the screen one is ready
for a rape, a lynching, a murder, or a war in actual life: when the
surrogate excitements of the film and the radio begin to pall, a taste
of real blood becomes necessary. In short: the shock-absorber pre-
pares one for a fresh shock.

13: Resistance and Adjustment

In all these efforts to attack, to resist, or to retreat from the
machine the observer may be tempted to see nothing more than
the phenomenon that Professor W. F. Ogburn has described as the
‘‘"'cultural lag.” The failure of ^“adjustment” may be looked upon as
a failure of art and morals and religion to change with the same
degree of rapidity as the machine and to change in the same direction.

This seems to me an essentially superficial interpretation. For
one thing, change in a direction opposite to the machine may be as
important in ensuring adjustment as change in the same direction,
when it happens that the machine is taking a course that would,

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS

317

unless compensated, lead to human deterioration and collapse. For
another thing, this interpretation regards the machine as an inde-
pendent structure, and it holds the direction and rate of change
assumed by the machine as a norm, to which all the other aspects^ of
human life must conform. In truth, interactions between organisms
and their environments take place in both directions, and it is just
as correct to regard the machinery of warfare as retarded in relation
to the morality of Confucius as to take the opposite position. In his
The Instinct of Workmanship Thorstein Veblen carefully avoided
the one-sided notion of adjustment: but later economists and sociolo-
gists have not always been so unparochial, and they have treated the
machine as if it were final and as if it were something other than the
projection of one particular side of the human personality.

All the arts and. institutions of man derive their authority from
the nature of human life as such. This applies as fully to technics
as to painting. A particular economic or technical regime may deny
this nature, as some particular social custom, like that of binding
the feet of women or enforcing virginity, may deny the patent facts
of physiology and anatomy: but such erroneous views and usages
do not eliminate the fact they deny. At all events, the mere bulk of
technology, its mere power and ubiquitousness, give no proof what-
ever of its relative human value or its place in the economy of an
intelligent human society. The very fact that one encounters resist-
ances, reversions, archaicisms at the moment of the greatest technical
achievement — even among those classes who have, from the stand-
point of wealth and power, benefited most by the victory of the
machine — ^makes one doubt both the effectiveness and the suSiciency
of the whole scheme of life the machine has so far brought into
existence. And who is so innocent today as to think that maladjust-
ment to the machine can be solved by the simple process of intro-
ducing greater quantities of machinery?

Plainly, if human life consisted solely in adjustment to the dom-
inant physical and social environment, man would have left the
world as he found it, as most of his biological companions have done:
the machine itself would not have been invented. Man’s singular
ability consists in the fact that he creates standards and ends of his

318 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

own, not given directly in the external scheme of things, and in ful-
filling his own nature in cooperation with the environment, he creates
a third realm, the realm of the arts, in which the two are harmonized
and ordered and made significant. Man is that part of nature in
which causality may, under appropriate circumstances, give place to
finality: in which the ends condition the means. Sometimes man’s
standards are grotesque and arbitrary: untempered by positive
knowledge and a just sense of his limitations, man is capable of
deforming the human anatomy in pursuit of a barbarous dream of
beauty, or, to objectify his fears and his tortured desires, he may
resort to horrible human sacrifices. But even in these perversions
there is an acknowledgment that man himself in part creates the
conditions imder which he lives, and is not merely the impotent
prisoner of circumstances.

If this has been man’s attitude toward Nature, why should he
assume a more craven posture in confronting the machine, whose
physical laws he discovered, whose body he created, whose rhythms
he anticipated by external feats of regimentation in his own life?
It is absurd to hold that we must continue to accept the bourgeoisie’s
overwhelming concern for power, practical success, above all for
comfort, or that we must passively absorb, without discrimination
and selection — ^which implies, where necessary, rejection — all the
new products of the machine. It is equally foolish to believe that we
must conform our living and thinking to the antiquated ideological
system which helped create the numerous brilliant short cuts that
attended the early development of the machine. The real question
before us lies here: do these instruments further life and enhance
its values, or not? Some of the results, as I shall show in the next
chapter, are admirable, far more admirable even than the inventor
and the industrialist and the utilitarian permitted himself to imagine.
Other aspects of the machine are on the contrary trifling, and still
others, like modem mechanized warfare, are deliberately antag-
onistic to every ideal of humanity — even to the old-fashioned ideal
of the soldier who once risked his life in equal combat. In these latter
cases, our problem is to eliminate or subjugate the machine, unless
we ourselves wish to be eliminated. For it is not automatism and

COMPENSATIONS AND REVERSIONS 319

Standardization and order that are dangerous: what is dangerous
is the restriction of life that has so often attended their untutored
acceptance. By what inept logic must we bow to our creation if it
be a machine, and spurn it as “unreal” if -it happens to be a painting
or a poem? The machine is just as much a creature of thought as
the poem: the poem is as much a fact of reality as the machine.
Those who use the machine when they need to react to life directly
or employ the humane arts, are as completely lacking in efficiency
as if they studied metaphysics in order to learn how to bake bread.
The question in each case is: what is the appropriate life-reaction?
How far does this or that instrument further the biological purposes
or the ideal ends of life?

Every form of life, as Patrick Geddes has expressed it, is marked
not merely by adjustment to the environment, but by insurgence
against the environment: it is both creature and creator, both the
victim of fate and the master of destiny: it lives no less by domination
than by acceptance. In man this insurgence reaches its apex, and
manifests itself most completely, perhaps, in the arts, where dream
and actuality, the imagination and its limiting conditions, the ideal
and the means, are fused together in the dynamic act of expression
and in the resultant body that is expressed. As a being with a social
heritage, man belongs to a world that includes the past and the future,
in which he can by his selective efforts create passages and ends not
derived from the immediate situation, and alter the blind direction
of the senseless forces that surround him.

To recognize these facts is perhaps the first step toward dealing
rationally with the machine. We must abandon our futile and lament-
able dodges for resisting the machine by stultifying relapses into
savagery, by recourse to anesthetics and shock-absorbers. Though
they temporarily may relieve the strain, in the end they do more
harm than they avoid. On the other hand, the most objective advo-
cates of the machine must recognize the underlying human validity
of the Romantic protest against the machine: the elements originally
embodied in literature and art in the romantic movement are essen-
tial parts of the human heritage that can not be neglected or flouted:
they point to a synthesis more comprehensive than that developed

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through the organs of the machine itself- Failing to create this
synthesis, failing to incorporate it in our personal and communal life,
the machine will be able to continue only with the aid of shock-
absorbers which confirm its worst characteristics, or with the com-
pensatory adjustment of vicious and barbaric elements which will,
in all probability, ruin the entire structure of our civilization.

CHAPTER VII.

ASSIMILATION OF
THE MACHINE

1 : New Cultural Values

The tools and utensils used during the greater part of man’s history
were, in the main, extensions of his own organism: they did not
have — ^what is more important they did not seem to have — an
independent existence. But though they were an intimate part of the
worker, they reacted upon his capacities, sharpening his eye, refining
his skill, teaching him to respect the nature of the material with
which he was dealing. The tool brought man into closer harmony
with his environment, not merely because it enabled him to re-shape
it, but because it made him recognize the limits of his capacities.
In dream, he was all powerful: in reality he had to recognize the
weight of stone and cut stones no bigger than he could transport.
In the book of wisdom the carpenter, the smith, the potter, the
peasant wrote, if they did not sign, their several pages. And in this
sense, technics has been, in every age, a constant instrument of dis-
cipline and education. A surviving primitive might, here and there,
vent his anger on a cart that got stuck in the mud by breaking up its
wheels, in the same fashion that he would beat a donkey that refused
to move: but the mass of mankind learned, at least during the period
of the written record, that certain parts of the environment can neither
be intimidated nor cajoled. To control them, one must learn the laws
of their behavior, instead of petulantly imposing one’s own wishes.
Thus the lore and tradition of technics, however empirical, tended to
create the picture of an objective reality. Something of this fact re-
mained in the Victorian definition of science as “organized common
sense.”

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322 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Because of their independent source of power, and their semi-
automatic operation even in their cruder forms, machines have
seemed to have a reality and an independent existence apart from
the user. Whereas the educational values of handicraft were mainly
in the process, those of the machine were largely in the preparatory
design : hence the process itself was understood only by the machin-
ists and technicians responsible for the design and operation of the
actual machinery. As production became more mechanized and the
discipline of the factory became more impersonal and the work itself
became less rewarding, apart from such slight opportunities for social
intercourse as it furthered, attention was centered more and more
upon the product: people valued the machine for its external achieve-
ments, for the number of yards of cloth it wove, for the number of
miles it carried them. The machine thus appeared purely as an
external instrument for the conquest of the environment: the actual
forms of the products, the actual collaboration and intelligence mani-
fested in creating them, the educational possibilities of this impersonal
cooperation itself — all these elements were neglected. We assimilated
the objects rather than the spirit that produced them, and so far
from respecting that spirit, we again and again attempted to make
the objects themselves seem to be something other than a product
of the machine. We did not expect beauty through the machine any
more than we expected a higher standard of morality from the
laboratory: yet the fact remains that if we seek an authentic sample
of a new esthetic or a higher ethic during the nineteenth century it
is in technics and science that we will perhaps most easily find them.

The practical men themselves were the very persons who stood in
the way of our recognizing that the significance of the machine was
not limited to its practical achievements. For, on the terms that the
inventors and industrialists considered the machine, it did not carry
over from the factory and the marketplace into any other depart-
ment of human life, except as a means. The possibility that technics
had become a creative force, carried on by its own momentum,
that it was rapidly ordering a new kind of environment and was pro-
ducing a third estate midway between nature and the humane arts,
that it was not merely a quicker way of achieving old ends but an

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effective way of expressing new ends — ^the possibility in short that
the machine furthered a new mode of living was far from the minds
of those who actively promoted it. The industrialists and engineers
themselves did not believe in the qualitative and cultural aspects of
the machine. In their indifference to these aspects, they were just as
far from appreciating the nature of the machine as were the Ro-
mantics: only what the Romantics, judging the machine from the
standpoint of life, regarded as a defect the utilitarian boasted of
as a virtue: for the latter the absence of art was an assurance of
practicality.

If the machine had really lacked cultural values, the Romantics
would have been right, and their desire to seek these values, if need
be, in a dead past would have been justified by the very desperateness
of the case. But the interests in the factual and the practical, which
the industrialist made the sole key to intelligence, were only two in
a whole series of new values that had been called into existence by
the development of the new technics. Matters of fact and practice
had usually in previous civilizations been treated with snobbish con-
tempt hy the leisured classes: as if the logical ordering of proposi-
tions were any nobler a technical feat than the articulation of ma-
chines. The interest in the practical was symptomatic of that wider
and more intelligible world in which people had begun to live, a
world in which the taboos of class and caste could no longer be con-
sidered as definitive in dealing with events and experiences. Cap-
italism and technics had both acted as a solvent of these clots of
prejudice and intellectual confusion; and they were thus at first im-
portant liberators of life.

From the beginning, indeed, the most durable conquests of the
machine lay not in the instruments themselves, which quickly became
outmoded, nor in the goods produced, which quickly were consumed,
but in the modes of life made possible via the machine and in the
machine: the cranky mechanical slave was also a pedagogue. While
the machine increased the servitude of servile personalities, it also
promised the further liberation of released personalities: it challenged
thought and effort as no previous system of technics had done. No
part of the environment, no social conventions, could be taken for

324 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

granted, once the machine had shown how far order and system and

intelligence might prevail over the raw nature of things.

What remains as the permanent contribution of the machine, car-
ried over from one generation to another, is the technique of coop-
erative thought and action it has fostered, the esthetic excellence of
the machine forms, the delicate logic of materials and forces, which
has added a new canon — ^the machine canon — ^to the arts: above all,
perhaps, the more objective personality that has come into existence
through a more sensitive and understanding intercourse with these
new social instruments and through their deliberate cultural assimi-
lation. In projecting one side of the human personality into the
concrete forms of the machine^ we have created an independent envi-
ronment that has reacted upon every other side of the personality.

In the past, the irrational and demonic aspects of life had invaded
spheres where they did not belong. It was a step in advance to dis-
cover that bacteria, not brownies, were responsible for curdling milk,
and that an air-cooled motor was more effective than a witch’s broom-
stick for rapid long distance transportation. This triumph of order
was pervasive: it gave a confidence to human purposes akin to that
which a well-drilled regiment has when it marches in step. Creating
the illusion of invincibility, the machine actually added to the amount
of power man can exercize. Science and technics stiffened our morale:
by their very austerities and abnegations they enhanced the value of
the human personality that submitted to their discipline: they cast
contempt on childish fears, childish guesses, equally childish asser-
tions. By means of the machine man gave a concrete and external
and impersonal form to his desire for order: and in a subtle way
he thus set a new standard for his personal life and his more organic
attitudes. Unless he was better than the machine he would only find
himself reduced to its level: dumb, servile, abject, a creature of
immediate reflexes and passive unselective responses.

While many of the boasted achievements of industrialism are
merely rubbish, and while many of the goods produced by the ma-
chine are fraudulent and evanescent, its esthetic, its logic, and its
factual technique remain a durable contribution: they are among
man’s supreme conquests. The practical results may be admirable

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or dubious: but the method that underlies them has a permanent
importance to the race, apart from its immediate consequences. For
the machine has added a whole series of arts to those produced by
simple tools and handicraft methods and it has added a new realm
to the environment in which the cultured man works and feels and
thinks. Similarly, it has extended the power and range of human ^
organs and has disclosed new esthetic spectacles, new worlds. The
exact arts produced with the aid of the machine have their proper
standards and give their own peculiar satisfactions to the human
spirit. Differing in technique from the arts of the past, they spring
nevertheless from the same source: for the machine itself, I must
stress for the tenth time, is a human product, and its very abstractions
make it more definitely human in one sense than those humane arts
which on occasion realistically counterfeit nature.

Here, beyond what appears at the moment of realization, is the
vital contribution of the machine. What matters the fact that the
ordinary workman has the equivalent of 240 slaves to help him, if
the master himself remains an imbecile, devouring the spurious news,
the false suggestions, the intellectual prejudices that play upon him
in the press and the school, giving vent in turn to tribal assertions
and priniitive lusts under the impression that he is the final token
of progress and civilization. One does not make a child powerful by
placing a stick of dynamite in his hands: one only adds to the dangers
of his irresponsibility. Were mankind to remain children, they would
exercize more effective power by being reduced to using a lump of
clay and an old-fashioned modelling tool. But if the machine is one
of the aids man has created toward achieving further intellectual
growth and attaining maturity, if he treats this powerful automaton
of his as a challenge to his own development^ if the exact arts
fostered by the machine have their own contribution to make to the
mind, and are aids in the orderly crystallization of experience, then
these contributions are vital ones indeed. The machine, which reached
such overwhelming dimensions in Western Civilization partly because
it sprang out of a disrupted and one-sided culture, nevertheless may
help in enlarging the provinces of culture itself and thereby in build-
ing a greater synthesis: in that case, it will carry an antidote to

326 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

its own poison. So let us consider the machine more closely as an
instrument of culture and examine the ways in which we have begim,
during the last century, to assimilate it,

2: The Neutrality of Order

Before the machine pervaded life, order was the hoast of the
gods and absolute monarchs. Both the deity and his representatives
on earth had, however, the misfortune to be inscrutable in their
judgment and frequently capricious and cruel in their assertion of
mastery. On the human level, their order was represented by slavery:
complete determination from above: complete subservience without
question or understanding below. Behind the gods and the absolute
monarchs stood brute nature itself, filled with demons, djinns, trolls,
giants, contesting the reign of the gods. Chance and the accidental
malice of the universe cut across the purposes of men and the observ-
able regularities of nature. Even as a symbol the absolute monarch
was weak as an exponent of order: his troops might obey with abso-
lute precision, but he might he undone, as Hans Andersen pointed out
in one of his fairy tales, by the small torture of a gnat.

With the development of the sciences and with the articulation of
the machine in practical life, the realm of order was transferred
from the absolute rulers, exercizing a personal control, to the universe
of impersonal nature and to the particular group of artifacts and
customs we call the machine. The royal formula of purpose — “I
wiU” — ^was translated into the causal terms of science — “It must.”
By partly supplanting the crude desire for personal dominion by an
impersonal curiosity and by the desire to understand, science pre-
pared the way for a more effective conquest of the external environ-
ment and ultimately for a more effective control of the agent, man,
himself. That a part of the order of the universe was a contribution
by man himself, that the limitations imposed upon scientific research
by human instruments and interests tend to produce an orderly and
mathematically analyzable result, does not lessen the wonder and
the beauty of the system: it rather gives to the conception of the
universe itself some of the character of a work of art. To acknowl-
edge the limitations imposed by science, to subordinate the wish to

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 327

the fact, and to look for order as an emergent in observed relations,
rather than as an extraneous scheme imposed upon these relations —
these were the great contributions of the new outlook on life. Express-
ing regularities and recurrent series, science widened the area of
certainty, prediction, and control.

By deliberately cutting off certain phases of man’s personality, the
warm life of private sensation and private feelings and private per-
ceptions, the sciences assisted in building up a more public world
which gained in accessibility what it lost in depth. To measure a
weight, a distance, a charge of electricity, by reference to pointer
readings established within a mechanical system, deliberately con-
structed for this purpose, was to limit the possibility of errors of
interpretation, and cancel out the differences of individual experience
and private history. And the greater the degree of abstraction and
limitation, the greater was the accuracy of reference. By isolating
simple systems and simple causal sequences the sciences created con-
fidence in the possibility of finding a similar type of order in every
aspect of experience: it was, indeed, by the success of science in the
realm of the inorganic that we have acquired whatever belief we may
legitimately entertain in the possibility of achieving similar under-
standing and control in the vastly more complex domain of life.

The first steps in the physical sciences did not go very far. Com-
pared to organic behavior, in which any one of a given set of stimuli
may create the same reaction, or in which a single stimulus may
under different conditions create a number of different reactions,
in which the organism as a whole responds and changes at the same
time as the isolated part one seeks to investigate, compared to
behavior within this frame the most complicated physical reaction
is gratifyingly simple. But the point is that by means of the analyses
and instruments developed in the physical sciences and embodied
in technics, some of the necessary preliminary instruments for bio-
logical and social exploration have been created. All measurement
involves the reference of certain parts of a complex phenomenon
to a simpler one whose characteristics are relatively independent and
fixed and determinable. The whole personality was a useless instru-
ment for investigating limited mechanical phenomena. In its im-

328 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

critical state, it was likewise useless for investigating organic systems,
whether they were animal organisms or social groups. By a process
of dismemberment science created a more useful type of order: an
order external to the self. In the long run that special limitation for-
tified the ego as perhaps no other achievement in thought had done.

Although the most intense applications of the scientific method
were in technology, the interests that it satisfied and re-excited, the
desire for order that it expressed, translated themselves in other
spheres. More and more factual research, the document, the exact
calculation became a preliminary to expression. Indeed, the respect
for quantities became a new condition of what had hitherto been
crude qualitative judgments. Good and bad, beauty and ugliness, are
determined, not merely by their respective natures but by the quan-
tity one may assign to them in any particular situation. To think
closely with respect to quantities is to think more accurately about
the essential nature and the actual functions of things: arsenic is a
tonic in grains and a poison in oimces: the quantity, the local com-
position, and the environmental relation of a quality are as important,
so to say, as its original sign as quality. It is for this reason that a
whole series of ethical distinctions, based upon the notion of pure and
absolute qualities without relation to their amounts, has been instinc-
tively discarded by a considerable part of mankind: while Samuel
Butler’s dictum, that every virtue should be mixed with a little of
its opposite, implying as it does that qualities are altered by their
quantitative relations, seems much closer to the heart of the matter.
This respect for quantity has been grossly caricatured by dull
pedantic minds who have sought by mathematical means to elimi-
nate the qualitative aspects of complicated social and esthetic situa-
tions: but one need not be led by their mistake into failing to
recognize the peculiar contribution that our qpiantitative technique
has made in departments apparently remote from the machine.

One must distinguish between the cult of Nature as a standard
and a criterion of hmnan expression and the general influence of
the scientific spirit. As for the first, one may say that though Ruskin,
an esthetic disciple of science, rejected the Greek fret in decoration
because it had no counterpart among flowers, minerals, or animals.

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for us today nature is no longer an absolute: or ratber, we no longer
regard nature as if man himself were not implicated in her, and as
if his modifications of nature were not themselves a part of the
natural order to which he is born. Even when emphasizing the imper-
sonality of the machine one must not forget the busy humanizing
that goes on before man even half completes his picture of an objec-
tive and indiflPerent nature. All the tools man uses, his eyes with
their limited field of vision and their insensitiveness to ultra-violet
and infra-red rays, his hands which can hold and manipulate only
a limited number of objects at one time, his mind which tends to
create categories of twos and threes because, without intensive train-
ing, to hold as many ideas together as a musician can hold notes
of the piano puts an excessive strain upon his intelligence — still
more his microscopes and balances, all bear the imprint of his own
character as well as the general characteristics imposed by the physi-
cal environment. It has only been by a process of reasoning and
inference — itself not free from the taint of his origin — ^that man has
established the neutral realm of nature. Man may arbitrarily define
nature as that part of his experience which is neutral to his desires
and interests: but he with his desires and interests, to say nothing of
his chemical constitution, has been formed by nature and inescapably
is part of the system of nature. Once he has picked and chosen from
this realm, as he does in science, the result is a work of art — his art:
certainly it is no longer in a state of nature.

In so far as the cult of nature has made men draw upon a wider
experience, to discover themselves in hitherto unexplored environ-
ments, and to contrive new isolations in the laboratory which will
enable them to make further discoveries, it has been a good influence:
man should be at home among the stars as well as at his own fireside.
But although the new canon of order has a deep esthetic as well as an
intellectual status, external nature has no finally independent author-
ity: it exists, as a result of man’s collective experience, and as a
subject for his further improvisations by means of science, technics,
and the humane arts.

The merit of the new order was to give man by projection an
outer world which helped him to make over the hot spontaneous

330 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

world of desire he carried within. But the new order, the new imper-
sonality, was but a fragment transplanted from the personality as a
whole: it had existed as part of man before he cut it off and gave
it an independent milieu and an independent root system. The com-
prehension and transformation of this impersonal “external” world
of technics was one of the great revelations of the painters and artists
and poets of the last three centuries. Art is the re-enactment of reality,
of a reality purified, freed from constraints and irrelevant accidents,
unfettered to the material circumstances that confuse the essence.
The passage of the machine into art was in itself a signal of release —
a sign that the hard necessities of practice, the preoccupation with the
immediate battle was over — a sign that the mind was free once more
to see, to contemplate, and so to enlarge and deepen all the practical
benefits of the machine.

Science had something other to contribute to the arts than the
notion that the machine was an absolute. It contributed, through
its effects upon invention and mechanization, a new type of order to
the environment: an order in which power, economy, objectivity,
the collective will play a more decisive part than they had played
before even in such absolute forms of dominion as in the royal
priesthood — and engineers — of Egypt or Babylon. The sensitive
apprehension of this new environment, its translation into terms
which involve human affections and feelings, and that bring into
play once more the full personality, became part of the mission of
the artist: and the great spirits of the nineteenth century, who first
fully greeted this altered environment, were not indifferent to it.
Turner and Tennyson, Emily Dickinson and Thoreau, Whitman and
Emerson, all saluted with admiration the locomotive, that symbol
of the new order in Western Society. They were conscious of the fact
that new instruments were changing the dimensions and to some
extent therefore the very qualities of experience; these facts were
just as clear to Thoreau as to Samuel Smiles; to Kipling as to H. G.
Wells. The telegraph wire, the locomotive, the ocean steamship, the
very shafts and pistons and switches that conveyed and canalized or
controlled the new power, could awaken emotion as well as the harp

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and the war-horse: the hand at the throttle or the switch was no less
regal than the hand that had once held a scepter.

The second contribution of the scientific attitude was a limiting
one: it tended to destroy the lingering mythologies of Greek god-
desses and Christian heroes and saints; or rather, it prevented a
naive and repetitious use of these symbols. But at the same time, it
disclosed new universal symbols, and widened the very domain of
the symbol itself. This process took place in all the arts: it affected
poetry as well as architecture. The pursuit of science, however, sug-
gested new myths. The transformation of the medieval folk-legend
of Dr. Faustus from Marlowe to Goethe, with Faust ending up as a
builder of canals and a drainer of swamps and finding the meaning
of life in sheer activity, the transformation of the Prometheus myth
in Melville’s Moby Dick, testify not to the destruction of myths by
positive knowledge but to their more pregnant application. I can only
repeat here what I have said in another place: “What the scientific
spirit has actually done has been to exercise the imagination in finer
ways than the autistic wish — ^the wish of the infant possessed of the
illusions of power and domination — ^was able to express. Faraday’s
ability to conceive the lines of force in a magnetic field was quite
as great a triumph as the ability to conceive of fairies dancing in
a ring: and, Mr. A. N. Whitehead has shown, the poets who sympa-
thized with this new sort of imagination, poets like Shelley, Words-
worth, Whitman, Melville, did not feel themselves robbed of their
specific powers, hut rather found them enlarged and refreshed.

“One of the finest love poems in the nineteenth century. Whitman’s
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, is expressed in such an image
as Darwin or Audubon might have used, were the scientist as capable
of expressing his inner feelings as of noting ‘external’ events: the
poet haunting the seashore and observing the mating of the birds,
day after day following their life, cotild scarcely have existed before
the nineteenth century. In the early seventeenth century such a poet
would have remained in the garden and written about a literary
ghost, Philomel, and not about an actual pair of birds; in Pope’s
time the poet would have remained in the library and written about
the birds on a lady’s fan. Almost all the important works of the

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nineteenth century were cast in this mode and expressed the new
imaginative range: they respect the fact: they are replete with obser-
vation: they project an ideal realm in and through, not transcenden-
tally over, the landscape of actuality. Notre Dame might have been
written by an historian. War and Peace by a sociologist. The Idiot
might have been created by a psychiatrist, and Salammbo might
have been the work of an archaeologist. I do not say that these
hooks were scientific by intention, or that they might be replaced
by a work of science without grave loss; far from it. I merely point
out that they were conceived in the same spirit; that they belong to
a similar plane of consciousness.”

Once the symbol was focussed, the task of the practical arts
became more purposive. Science gave the artist and the technician
new objectives: it demanded that he respond to the nature of the
machine’s functions and refrain from seeking to express his per-
sonality by irrelevant and surreptitious means upon the objective
material. The woodiness of wood, the glassiness of glass, the metallic
quality of steel, the movement of motion — ^these attributes had been
analyzed out by chemical and physical means, and to respect them
was to understand and work with the new environment. Ornament,
conceived apart from function, was as barbarous as the tattooing of
the human body: the naked object, whatever it was, had its own
beauty, whose revealment made it more human, and more close to
the new personality than could any amount of artful decoration.
While the Dutch gardeners of the seventeenth century had often,
for example, turned the privet and the box into the shapes of animals
and arbitrary figures, a new type of gardening appeared in the
twentieth century which respected the natural ecological partner-
ships, and which not merely permitted plants to grow in their natural
shapes but sought simply to clarify their natural relationships: scien-
tific knowledge was one of the facts that indirectly contributed to
the esthetic pleasure. That change symbolizes what has been steadily
happening, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, in all the arts.
For finally, if nature itself is not an absolute, and if the facts of
external nature are not the artist’s sole materials, nor its literal
imitation his guarantee of esthetic success, science nevertheless gives

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him the assurance of a partly independent realm which defines the
limits of his own working powers. In creating. his union of the
inner world and the outer, of his passions and affections with the
thing that exists, the artist need not remain the passive victim of his
neurotic caprices and hallucinations: hence even when he departs
from some external objective form or some tried convention, he still
has a common measure of the extent of his. deviation. While the
determinism of the object — if one may coin a phrase — is more em-
phatic in the mechanical arts than in the humane ones, a binding
thread runs through both realms.

Co-ordinate with the intellectual assimilation of the machine by
the technician and the artist, which came partly through habit, partly
through workaday experience, and partly through the extension of
systematic training in science, came the esthetic and emotional appre-
hension of the new environment. Let us consider this in detail.

3: The Esthetic Experience of the Machine

The developed environment of the machine in the twentieth cen-
tury has its kinship with primitive approximations to this order in
the castles and fortifications and bridges from the eleventh to the
thirteenth centuries, and even later: the bridge at Tournay or the
brickwork and vaults of the Marienkirche at Liibeck: these earliest
touches of the practical have the same fine characteristics that the
latest grain elevators or steel cranes have. But the new characteristics
now touch almost every department of experience. Observe the der-
ricks, the ropes, the stanchions and ladders of a modern steamship,
close at hand in the night, when the hard shadows mingle obliquely
with the hard white shapes. Here is a new fact of esthetic experience;
and it must be transposed in the same hard way: to look for gradation
and atmosphere here is to miss a fresh quality that has emerged
through the use of mechanical forms and mechanical modes of light-
ing. Or stand on a deserted subway platform and contemplate the
low cavity becoming a black disc into which, as the train rumbles
toward the station, two green circles appear as pin-points widening
into plates. Or follow the spidery repetition of boundary lines,
defining unoccupied cubes, which make the skeleton of a modern

334 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

skyscraper: an effect not given even in wood before machine-sawed
beams were possible. Or pass along the waterfront in Hamburg, say,
and review the line of gigantic steel birds with spread legs that
preside over the filling and emptying of the vessels in the basin:
that span of legs, that long neck, the play of movement in this vast
mechanism, the peculiar pleasure derived from the apparent light-
ness combined with enormous strength in its working, never existed
on this scale in any other environment: compared to these cranes
the pyramids of Egypt belong to the order of mud-pies. Or put your
eye at the eyepiece of a microscope, and focus the high-powered
lens on a thread, a hair, a section of leaf, a drop of blood: here is
a world with forms and colors as varied and mysterious as those one
finds in the depths of the sea. Or stand in a warehouse and observe
a row of bathtubs, a row of siphons, a row of bottles, each of iden-
tical size, shape, color, stretching away for a quarter of a mile: the
special visual effect of a repeating pattern, exhibited once in great
temples or massed armies, is now a commonplace of the mechanical
environment. There is an esthetic of units and series, as well as an
esthetic of the unique and the non-repeatable.

Absent from such experiences, for the most part, is the play of
surfaces, the dance of subtle lights and shadows, the nuances of
color, tones, atmosphere, the intricate harmonies that human bodies
and specifically organic settings display — all the qualities that belong
to the traditional levels of experience and to the unordered world
of nature. But face to face with these new machines and instruments,
with their hard surfaces, their rigid volumes, their stark shapes, a
fresh kind of perception and pleasure emerges: to interpret this
order becomes one of the new tasks of the arts. While these new
qualities existed as facts of mechanical industry, they were not gen-
erally recognized as values until they were interpreted by the painter
and the sculptor; and so they existed in an indifferent anonymity
for more than a century. The new forms were sometimes appreciated,
perhaps, as symbols of Progress: but art, as such, is valued for
what it is, not for what it indicates, and the sort of attention needed
for the appreciation of art was largely lacking in the industrial
environment of the nineteenth century, and except for the work

335

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE

of an occasional engineer of great talent, like Eiffel, was looked
upon with deep suspicion.

At the very moment when the praise of industrialism was loudest
and most confident, the environment of the machine was regarded
as inherently ugly: so ugly that it mattered not how much additional
ugliness was created by litter, refuse, slag-piles, scrap metal, or re-
movable dirt. Just as Watt’s contemporaries demanded more noise
in the steam engine, as a proclamation of power, so did the paleo-
technic mind glory, for the most part, in the anti-esthetic quality
of the machine.

The Cubists were perhaps the first school to overcome this asso-
ciation of the ugly and the mechanical: they not merely held that
beauty could be produced through the machine: they even pointed
to the fact that it had been produced. The first expression of Cubism
indeed dates back to the seventeenth century: Jean Baptiste Bracelle,
in 1624, did a series of Bizarreries which depicted mechanical men,
thoroughly cubist in conception. This anticipated in art, as Glanvill
did in science, our later interests and inventions. What did the
modern Cubists do? They extracted from the organic environment
just those elements that could be stated in abstract geometrical sym-
bols: they transposed and readjusted the contents of vision as freely
as the inventor readjusted organic functions: they even created on
canvas or in metal mechanical equivalents of organic objects: Leger
painted human figures that looked as if they had been turned in a
lathe, and Duchamp-Villon modeled a horse as if it were a machine.
This whole process of rational experiment in abstract mechanical
forms was pushed further by the constructivists. Artists like Grabo
and Moholy-Nagy put together pieces of abstract sculpture, composed
of glass, metal plates, spiral springs, wood, which were the non-
utilitarian equivalents of the apparatus that the physical scientist
was using in his laboratory. They created in form the semblance of
the mathematical equations and physical formulae that had pro-
duced our new environment, seeking in this new sculpture to observe
the physical laws of equipose or to evolve dynamic equivalents for
the solid sculpture of the past by rotating a part of the object
through space.

336 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

The ultimate worth of such efforts did not perhaps lie in the art
itself: for the original machines and instruments were often just as
stimulating as their equivalents, and the new pieces of sculpture
were just as limited as the machines. No: the worth of these efforts
lay in the increased sensitiveness to the mechanical environment that
was produced in those who understood and appreciated this art. The
esthetic experiment occupied a place comparable to the scientific
experiment: it was an attempt to use a certain kind of physical
apparatus for the purpose of isolating a phenomenon in experience
and for determining the values of certain relations: the experiment
was a guide to thought and an approach to action. Like the abstract
paintings of Braque, Picasso, Leger, Kandinsky, these constructivist
experiments sharpened the response to the machine as an esthetic
object. By analyzing, with the aid of simple constructions, the effects
produced, they showed what to look for and what values to expect.
Calculation, invention, mathematical organization played a special
role in the new visual effects produced by the machine, while the
constant lighting of the sculpture and the canvas, made possible by
electricity, profoundly altered the visual relationship. By a process
of abstraction the new paintings finally, in some of the painters like
Mondrian, approached a purely geometrical formula, with a mere
residue of visual content.

Perhaps the most complete as well as the most brilliant interpreta-
tions of the capacities of the machine was in the sculpture of Bran-
cusi: for he exhibited both form, method, and symbol. In Brancusi’s
work one notes first of all the importance of the material, with its
specific weight, shape, texture, color, finish: when he models in
wood he still endeavors to keep the organic shape of the tree, empha-
sizing rather than reducing the part given by nature, whereas when
he models in marble he brings out to the full the smooth satiny
texture, in the smoothest and most egg-like of forms. The respect
for material extends further into the conception of the subject treated;
the individual is submerged, as in science, into the class: instead
of representing in marble the counterfeit head of a mother and child,
he lays two blocks of marble side by side with only the faintest de-
pression of surface to indicate the features of the face: it is by

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 337

relations of volume that he presents the generic idea of mother and
child: the idea in its most tenuous form. Again, in his famous bird,
he treats the object itself, in the brass model, as if it were the
piston of an engine: the tapering is as delicate, the polish is as high,
as if it were to be fitted into the most intricate piece of machinery,
in which so much as a few specks of dust would interfere with its
perfect action: looking at the bird, one thinks of the shell of a
torpedo. As for the bird itself, it is no longer any particular bird,
but a generic bird in its most birdlike aspect, the function of flight.
So, too, with his metallic or marble fish, looking like experimental
forms developed in an aviation laboratory, floating on the flawless
surface of a mirror. Here is the equivalent in art of the mechanical
world that lies about us on every hand: with this further perfection
of the symbol, that in the highly polished metallic forms the world
as a whole and the spectator himself, are likewise mirrored: so that
the old separation between subject and object is now figuratively
closed. The obtuse United Stales customs ofiicer who wished to
classify Brancusi’s sculpture as machinery or plumbing was in fact
paying it a compliment. In Brancusi’s sculpture the idea of the ma-
chiiTe is objectified and assimilated in equivalent works of art.

In this perception of the machine as a source of art, the new
painters and sculptors clarified the whole issue and delivered art
from the romantic prejudice against the machine as necessarily hos-
tile to the world of feeling. At the same time, they began to interpret
intuitively the new conceptions of time and space that distinguish
the present age from the Renascence. The course of this develop-
ment can perhaps be followed best in the photograph and the motion
picture: the specific arts of the machine.

4: Photography as Means and Symbol

The history of the camera, and of its product, the photograph,
illustrates the typical dilemmas that have arisen in the development
of the machine process and its application to objects of esthetic value.
Both the special feats of the machine and its possible perversions
are equally manifest.

At first, the limitations of the camera were a safeguard to its

338 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

intelligent use. The photographer, still occupied with difficult photo-
chemical and optical problems, did not attempt to extract from the
photograph any other values than those rendered immediately by
the technique itself; and as a result, the grave portraiture of some
of the early photographers, particularly that of David Octavius Hill
of Edinburgh, reached a high pitch of excellence: indeed it has not
often been surpassed by any of the later work. As the technical prob-
lems were solved one by one, through the use of better lenses, more
sensitive emulsions, new textures of paper to replace the shiny sur-
face of the daguerreotype, the photographer became more conscious
of the esthetic arrangements of the subjects before him: instead of
carrying the esthetic of the light-picture further, he returned timidly
to the canons of painting, and endeavored to make his pictures fit
certain preconceptions of beauty as achieved by the classical painters.
Far from glorying in minute and tangled representation of life,
as the mechanical eye confronts it, the photographer from the eighties
onward sought by means of soft lenses a foggy impressionism, or by
care of arrangement and theatrical lighting he attempted to imitate
the postures and sometimes the costumes of Holbein and Gains-
borough. Some experimenters even went so far as to imitate in the
photographic print the smudgy effect of charcoal or the crisp lines
of the etching. This relapse from clean mechanical processes to an
artful imitativeness worked ruin in photography for a full genera-
tion: it was like that relapse in the technique of furniture making
which used modem machinery to imitate the dead forms of antique
handicraft. In back of it was the failure to understand the intrinsic
esthetic importance of the new mechanical device in terms of its own
peculiar possibilities.

Every photograph, no matter how painstaking the observation of
the photographer or how long the actual exposure, is essentially a
snapshot: it is an attempt to penetrate and capture the unique
esthetic moment that singles itself out of the thousand of chance
compositions, uncrystallized and insignificant, that occur in the course
of a day. The photographer cannot rearrange his material on his
own terms. He must take the world as he finds it: at most his rear-
rangement is limited to a change in position or an alteration of the

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 339

direction and intensity of the light or in the length of the focus. He
must respect and understand sunlight, atmosphere, the time of day,
the season of the year, tlie capabilities of the machine, the processes
of chemical development; for the mechanical device does not function
automatically, and the results depend upon the exact correlation of
the esthetic moment itself with the appropriate physical means.
But whereas an underlying technique conditions both painting and
photography — for the painter, too, must respect the chemical com-
position of his colors and the physical conditions which will give
them permanence and visibility — ^photography differs from the other
graphic arts in that the process is determined at every state by the
external conditions that present themselves: his inner impulse, in-
stead of spreading itself in subjective fantasy, must always he in key
with outer circumstances. As for the various kinds of montage pho-
tography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of
painting, in which the photograph is used — as patches of textiles
are used in crazy-quilts — to form a mosaic. Whatever value the
montage may have derives from the painting rather than the camera.

Rare though painting of the first order is, photography of the
first rank is perhaps even rarer. The gamut of emotion and- signifi-
cance represented in photography by the work of Alfred Stieglitz in
America is one that the photographer rarely spans. Half the merit
of Stieglitz’ work is due to his rigorous respect for the limitations
of the machine and to the subtlety with which he effects the com-
bination of image and paper. He plays no tricks, he has no affecta-
tions, not even the affectation of being hard-boiled, for life and the
object have their soft moments and their tender aspects. The mission
of the photograph is to clarify the object. This objectification, this
clarification, are important developments in the mind itself: it is
perhaps the prime psychological fact that emerges with our rational
assimilation of the machine. To see as they are, as if for the first
time, a boatload of immigrants, a tree in Madison Square Park, a
woman’s breast, a cloud lowering over a black mountain — ^that re-
quires patience and understanding. Ordinarily we skip over and
schematize these objects, relate them to some practical need, or
subordinate them to some immediate wish: photography gives us

340 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the ability to recognize them in the independent form created by
light and shade and shadow. Good photography, then, is one of the
best educations toward a rounded sense of reality. Restoring to the
eye, otherwise so preoccupied with the abstractions of print, the
stimulus of things roundly seen as things, shapes, colors, textures,
demanding for its enjoyment a previous experience of light and
shade, this machine process in itself counteracts some of the worst
defects of our mechanical environment. It is the hopeful antithesis
to an emasculated and segregated esthetic sensibility, the cult of pure
form, which endeavors to hide away from the world that ulti-
mately gives shape and significance to its remotest symbols.

If photography has become popular again in our own day, after
its first great but somewhat sentimental outburst in the eighties, it
is perhaps because, like an invalid returning to health, we are
finding a new delight in being, seeing, touching, feeling; because in
a rural or a neotechnic environment the sunlight and pure air that
make it possible are present; because, too, we have at least learned
Whitman’s lesson and behold with a new respect the miracle of our
finger joints or the reality of a blade of grass: photography is not
least effective when it is dealing with such ultimate simplicities. To
disdain photography because it cannot achieve what El Greco or
Rembrandt or Tintoretto achieved is like dismissing science because
its view of the world is not comparable to the visions of Plotinus or
the mythologies of Hinduism. Its virtue lies precisely in the fact
that it has conquered another and quite different department of
reality. For photography, finally, gives the effect of permanence
to the transient and the ephemeral: photography — and perhaps pho-
tography alone — is capable of coping with and adequately present-
ing the complicated, inter-related aspects of our modern environ-
ment. As histories of the human comedy of our times, the photo-
graphs of Atget in Paris and of Stieglitz in New York are unique
both as drama and as document: not merely do they convey to us
the very shape and touch of this environment, but by the angle of
vision and the moment of observation throw an oblique light upon
our inner lives, our hopes, our values, our humours. And this art, of
all our arts, is perhaps the most widely used and the most fully

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 341

enjoyed: the amateur, the specialist, the news-photographer, and the
common man have all participated in this eye-opening experience,
and in this discovery of that esthetic moment which is the common
property of all experience, at all its various levels from ungoverned
dream to brute action and rational idea.

What has been said of the photograph applies even more, perhaps,
to the motion picture. In its first exploitation the motion picture
emphasized its unique quality: the possibility of abstracting and
reproducing objects in motion: the simple races and chases of the
early pictures pointed the art in the right direction. But in its subse-
quent commercial development it was degraded a little by the attempt
to make it the vehicle of a short-story or a novel or a drama: a mere
imitation in vision of entirely different arts. So one must distinguish
between the motion picture as an indifferent reproductive device,
less satisfactory in most ways than direct production on the stage,
and the motion picture as an art in its own right. The great achieve-
ments of the motion picture have been in the presentation of history
or natural history, the sequences of actuality, or in their interpreta-
tion of the inner realm of fantasy, as in the pure comedies of Charlie
Chaplin and Rene Clair and Walt Disney. Unlike the photograph,
the extremes of subjectivism and of factualism meet in the motion
picture. Nanook of the North, Chang, the S.S. Potemkin — ^these pic-
tures got their dramatic effect through their interpretation of an
immediate experience and through a heightened delight in actuality.
Their exoticism was entirely accidental: an equally good eye would
abstract the same order of significant events from the day’s routine
of a subway guard or a factory-hand: indeed, the most consistently
interesting pictures have been those of the newsreel — despite the
insufferable banality of the announcers who too often accompany
them.

Not plot in the old dramatic sense, but historic and geographic
sequences is the key to the arrangement of these new kinetic com-
positions: the passage of objects, organisms, dream images through
time and space. It is an unfortunate social accident — as has hap-
pened in so many departments of technics — ^that this art should have
been grossly diverted from its proper function by the commercial

342 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

necessity for creating sentimental shows for an emotionally empty
metropolitanized population, living vicariously on the kisses and
cocktails and crimes and orgies and murders of their shadow-idols.
For the motion picture symbolizes and expresses, better than do any
of the traditional arts, our modern world picture and the essential
conceptions of time and space which are already part of the unformu-
lated experience of millions of people, to whom Einstein or Bohr
or Bergson or Alexander are scarcely even names.

In Gothic painting one may recall time and space were successive
and unrelated: the immediate and the eternal, the near and the far,
were confused: the faithful time ordering of the medieval chroniclers
is marred by the jumble of events presented and by the impossibility
of distinguishing hearsay from observation and fact from conjecture.
In the Renascence space and time were co-ordinated within a single
system: but the axis of these events remained fixed, so to say, within
a single frame established at a set distance from the observer, whose
existence with reference to the system was innocently taken for
granted. Today, in the motion picture, which symbolizes our actual
perceptions and feelings, time and space are not merely co-ordinated
on their own axis, but in relation to an observer who himself, by his
position, partly determines the picture, and who is no longer fixed
but is likewise capable of motion. The moving picture, with its close-
ups and its S3naoptic views, with its shifting events and its ever-present
camera eye, with its spatial forms always shown through time, with
its capacity for representing objects that interpenetrate, and for
placing distant environments in immediate juxtaposition — as hap-
pens in instantaneous communication — with its ability, finally, to
represent subjective elements, distortions, hallucinations, it is today
the only art that can represent with any degree of concreteness the
emergent world-view that differentiates our culture from every pre-
ceding one.

Even with weak and trivial subjects, the art focusses interests and
captures values that the traditional arts leave untouched. Music alone
heretofore has represented movement through time: but the motion
picture synthesizes movement through both time and space, and in
the very fact that it can co-ordinate visual images with sound and

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 343

release both of these elements from the boundaries of apparent space
and a fixed location, it contributes something to our picture of the
world not given completely in direct experience. Utilizing our daily
experience of motion in the railroad train and the motor car, the
motion picture re-creates in symbolic form a world that is otherwise
beyond our direct perception or grasp. Without any conscious notion
of its destination, the motion picture presents us with a world of
interpenetrating, counter- influencing organisms: and it enables us
to think about that world with a greater degree of concreteness.
This is no small triumph in cultural assimilation. Though it has
been so stupidly misused, the motion picture nevertheless announces
itself as a major art of the neotechnic phase. Through the machine,
we have new possibilities of understanding the world we have helped
to create.

But in the arts, it is plain that the machine is an instrument with
manifold and conflicting possibilities. It may be used as a passive
substitute for experience; it may be used to counterfeit older forms
of art; it may also be used, in its own right, to concentrate and
intensify and express new forms of experience. As substitutes for
primary experience, the machine is worthless: indeed it is actually
debilitating. Just as the microscope is useless unless the eye itself is
keen, so all our mechanical apparatus in the arts depends for its
success upon the due cultivation of the organic, physiological, and
spiritual aptitudes that lie behind its use. The machine cannot be
used as a shortcut to escape the necessity for organic experience.
Mr. Waldo Frank has put the matter well: “Art,” he says, “cannot
become a language, hence an experience, imless it is practiced. To
the man who plays, a mechanical reproduction of music may mean
much, since he already has the experience to assimilate. But where
reproduction becomes the norm, the few music makers will grow more
isolate and sterile, and the ability to experience music will disappear.
The same is true with the cinema, dance, and even sport.”

Whereas in industry the machine may properly replace the human
being when he has been reduced to an automaton, in the arts the
machine can only extend and deepen man’s original functions and
intuitions. In so far as the phonograph and the radio do away with

344 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the impulse to sing, in so far as the camera does away with the im-
pulse to see, in so far as the automobile does away with the impulse
to walk, the machine leads to a lapse of function which is but one
step away from paralysis. But in the application of mechanical
instruments to the arts it is not the machine itself that we must fear.
The chief danger lies in the failure to integrate the arts themselves
with the totality of our life-experience: the perverse triumph of the
machine follows automatically from the abdication of the spirit. Con-
sciously to assimilate the machine is one means of reducing its
omnipotence. We cannot, as Karl Buecher wisely said, “give up the
hope that it will be possible to unite technics and art in a higher
rhythmical unity, which will restore to the spirit the fortunate serenity
and to the body the harmonious cultivation that manifest themselves
at their best among primitive peoples.” The machine has not de-
stroyed that promise. On the contrary, through the more conscious
cultivation of the machine arts and through greater selectivity in
their use, one sees the pledge of its wider fulfillment throughout
civilization. For at the bottom of that cultivation there must be the
direct and immediate experience of living itself: we must directly
see, feel, touch, manipulate, sing, dance, communicate before we
can extract from the machine any further sustenance for life. If we
are empty to begin with, the machine will only leave us emptier; if
we are passive and powerless to begin with, the machine will only
leave us more feeble.

5: The Growth of Fimctionalism

But modern technics, even apart from the special arts that it fos-
tered, had a cultural contribution to make in its own right. Just as
science underlined the respect for fact, so technics emphasized the
importance of function: in this domain, as Emerson pointed out, the
beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The nature of
this contribution can best be shown, perhaps, by describing the way
in which the problem of machine design was first faced, then evaded,
and finally solved.

One of the first products of the machine was the machine itself.
As in the organization of the first factories the narrowly practical

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 345

considerations were uppermost, and all the other needs of the per-
sonality were firmly shoved to one side. The machine was a direct
expression of its own functions: the first cannon, the first cross-
bows, the first steam engines were all nakedly built for action. But
once the primary problems of organization and operation had been
solved, the human factor, which had been left out of the picture,
needed somehow to be re-incorporated. The only precedent for this
fuller integration of form came naturally from handicraft: hence
over the incomplete, only partly realized forms of the early cannon,
the early bridges, the early machines, a meretricious touch of decora-
tion was added: a mere relic of the happy, semi-magical fantasies
that painting and carving had once added to every handicraft object.
Because perhaps the energies of the eotechnic period were so com-
pletely engrossed in the technical problems, it was, from the stand-
point of design, amazingly clean and direct: ornament flourished
in the utilities of life, flourished often perversely and extravagantly,
but one looks for it in vain among the machines pictured by Agricola
or Besson or the Italian engineers: they are as direct and factual as
was architecture from the tenth to the thirteenth century.

The worst sinners — ^that is the most obvious sentimentalists — ^were
the engineers of the paleotechnic period. In the act of recklessly de-
flowering the environment at large, tlrey sought to expiate their fail-
ures by adding a few sprigs or posies to the new engines they were
creating: they embellished their steam engines with Doric columns
or partly concealed them behind Gothic tracery: they decorated the
frames of their presses and their automatic machines with cast-iron
arabesque, they punched ornamental holes in the iron framework of
their new structures, from the trusses of the old wing of the Metro-
politan Museum to the base of the Eiffel tower in Paris. Everywhere
similar habits prevailed: the homage of hypocrisy to art. One notes
identical efforts on the original steam radiators, in the floral decora-
tions that once graced typewriters, in the nondescript ornament that
still lingers quaintly on shotguns and sewing machines, even if it has
at length disappeared from cash registers and Pullman cars — as long
before, in the first uncertainties of the new technics, the same division
had appeared in armor and in crossbows.

346 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

The second stage in machine design was a compromise. The object
was divided into two parts. One of them was to be precisely designed
for mechanical efficiency. The other was to be designed for looks.
While the utilitarian claimed the working parts of the structure the
esthete was, so to speak, permitted slightly to modify the surfaces
with his unimportant patterns, his plutonic flowers, his aimless fili-
gree, provided he did not seriously weaken the structure or conderrm
the function to inefficiency. Mechanically utilizing the machine, this
type of design shamefully attempted to conceal the origins that were
still felt as low and mean. The engineer had the uneasiness of a par-
venu, and the same impulse to imitate the most archaic patterns of his
betters.

Naturally the next stage was soon reached: the utilitarian and
the esthete withdrew again to their respective fields. The esthete^
insisting with justice that the structure was integral with the decora-
tion and that art was something more fimdamental than the icing
the pastrycook put on the cake, sought to make the old decoration
real by altering the nature of the structure. Taking his place as
workman, he began to revive the purely handicraft methods of the
weaver, the cabinet maker, the printer, arts that had survived for
the most part only in the more backward parts of the world, untouched
by the tourist and the commercial traveller. The old workshops and
ateliers were languishing and dying out in the nineteenth century,
especially in progressive England and in America, when new ones,
like those devoted to glass under William de Morgan in England,
and John La Farge in America, and Lalique in France, or to a mis-
cellany of handicrafts, such as that of William Morris in England,
sprang into existence, to prove by their example that the arts of the
past could survive. The industrial manufacturer, isolated from this
movement yet affected by it, contemptuous but half-convinced, made
an effort to retrieve his position by attempting to copy mechani-
cally the dead forms of art he found in the museum. So far from
gaining from the handicrafts movement by this procedure he lost
what little virtue his xmtutored designs possessed, issuing as they
sometimes did out of an intimate knowledge of the processes and
the materials.

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 347

The weakness of the original handicrafts movement was that it
assumed that the only important change in industry had been the
intrusion of the soulless machine. Whereas the fact was that every-
thing had changed, and all the shapes and patterns employed by-
technics were therefore bound to change, too. The world men carried
in their heads, their idolum, was entirely different from that which
set the medieval mason to carving the history of creation or the lives
of the saints above the portals of the cathedral, or a jolly image of
some sort above his own doorway. An art based like handicraft upon
a certain stratification of the classes and the social differentiation
of the arts could not survive in a world where men had seen the
French Revolution and had been promised some rough share of
equality. Modem handicraft, which sought to rescue the worker from
the slavery of shoddy machine production, merely enabled the well-
to-do to enjoy new objects that were as completely divorced from
the dominant social milieu as the palaces and monasteries that
the antiquarian art dealer and collector had begun to loot. The
educational aim of the arts and crafts movement was admirable ; and,
in so far as it gave courage and understanding to the amateur, it was
a success. If this movement did not add a sufficient amount of good
handicraft it at least took away a great deal of false art. William
Morris’s dictum, that one should not possess anything one did not
believe to be beautiful or know to be useful was, in the shallow
showy bourgeois world he addressed, a revolutionary dictum.

But the social outcome of the arts and crafts movement was not
commensurate with the needs of the new situation; as Mr. Frank
Lloyd Wright pointed out in his memorable speech at Hull House
in 1908, the machine itself was as much an instrument of art, in the
hands of an artist, as were the simple tools and utensils. To erect
a social barrier between machines and tools was really to accept
the false notion of the new industrialist who, bent on exploiting the
machine, which they owned, and jealous of the tool, which might
still be owned by the independent worker, bestowed on the machine
an exclusive sanctity and grace it did not merit. Lacking the courage
to use the machine as an instrument of creative purpose, and being
unable to attime themselves to new objectives and new standards, the

348 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

esthetes were logically compelled to restore a medieval ideology in
order to provide a social backing for their anti-machine bias. In
a wordy the arts and crafts movement did not grasp the fact that
the new technics, by expanding the role of the machine, had altered
the entire relation of handwork to production, and that the exact
processes of the machine were not necessarily hostile to handicraft
and fine workmanship. In its modern form handicraft could no
longer serve as in the past when it had worked under the form of
an intensive caste-specialization. To survive, handicraft would have
to adapt itself to the amateur, and it was bound to call into existence,
even in pure handwork, those forms of economy and simplicity
which the machine was claiming for its own, and to which it was
adapting mind and hand and eye. In this process of re-integration
certain ^^eternal” forms would be recovered: there are handicraft
forms dating back to a distant past which so completely fulfill their
functions that no amount of further calculation or experiment will
alter them for the better. These type-forms appear and reappear
from civilization to civilization; and if they had not been discovered
by handicraft, the machine would have had to invent them.

The new handicraft was in fact to receive presently a powerful
lesson from the machine. For the forms created by the machine,
when they no longer sought to imitate old superficial patterns of hand-
work, were closer to those that could be produced by the amateur
than were, for example, the intricacies of special joints, fine inlays,
matched woods, beads and carvings, complicated forms of metallic
ornament, the boast of handicraft in the past. While in the factory
the machine was often reduced to producing fake handicraft, in the
workshop of the amateur the reverse process could take place with
a real gain: he was liberated by the very simplicities of good machine
forms. Machine technique as a means to achieving a simplified and
purified form relieved the amateur from the need of respecting and
imitating the perversely complicated patterns of the past — patterns
whose complications were partly the result of conspicuous waste,
partly the outcome of technical virtuosity, and partly the result of
a different state of feeling. But before handicraft could thus be
restored as an admirable form of play and an efficacious relief from

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 349

a physically untutored life, it was necessary to dispose of the ma-
chine itself as a social and esthetic instrument. So the major con-
tribution to art was made, after all, by the industrialist who remained
on the job and saw it through.

With the third stage in machine design an alteration takes place.
The imagination is not applied to the mechanical object after the
practical design has been completed: it is infused into it at every
stage in development. The mind works through the medium of the
machine directly, respects the conditions imposed upon it, and — ^not
content with a crude quantitative approximation — seeks out a more
positive esthetic fulfillment. This must not be confused with the
dogma, so often current, that any mechanical contraption that works
necessarily is esthetically interesting. The source of this fallacy is
plain. In many cases, indeed, our eyes have been trained to recog-
nize beauty in nature, and with certain kinds of animals and birds
we have an especial sympathy. When an airplane becomes like a
gull it has the advantage of this long association and we properly
couple the beauty with the mechanical adequacy, since the poise and
swoop of a gull’s flight casts in addition a reflective beauty on its
animal structure. Having no such association with a milkweed seed,
we do not feel the same beauty in the autogyro, which is kept aloft
by a similar principle. Wliile genuine beauty in a thing of use must
always be joined to mechanical adequacy and therefore involves
a certain amount of intellectual recognition and appraisal, the rela-
tion is not a simple one: it points to a common source rather than an
identity.

In the conception of a machine or of a product of the machine
there is a point where one may leave off for parsimonious reasons
without having reached esthetic perfection: at this point perhaps
every mechanical factor is accounted for, and the sense of incom-
pleteness is due to the failure to recognize the claims of the human
agent. Esthetics carries with it the implication of alternatives be-
tween a number of mechanical solutions of equal validity: and
unless this awareness is present at every stage of tlie process, in
smaller matters of finish, fineness, trimness, it is not likely to come
out with any success in the final stage of design. Form follows func-

350

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tion, underlining it, crystallizing it, clarifying it, making it real to
the eye. Makeshifts and approximations express themselves in in-
complete forms: forms like the absurdly cumbrous and ill-adjusted
telephone apparatus of the past, like the old-fashioned airplane,
full of struts, wires, extra supports, all testifying to an anxiety to
cover innumerable unknown or uncertain factors; forms like the
old automobile in which part after part had been added to the
effective mechanism without having been absorbed into the body
of the design as a whole; forms like our oversized steel-work which
were due to our carelessness in using cheap materials and our desire
to avoid the extra expense of calculating them finely and expending
the necessary labor to work them up. The impulse that creates a
complete mechanical object is akin to that which creates an estheti-
cally finished object; and the fusion of the two at every stage in
the process will necessarily be effected by the environment at large:
who can gauge how much the slatternliness and disorder of the paleo-
technic environment undermined good design, or how much the order
and beauty of our neotechnic plants — ^like that of the Van Nelle
factory in Rotterdam — ^will eventually aid it? Esthetic interests can
not suddenly be introduced from without: they must be constantly
operative, constantly visible.

Expression through the machine implies the recognition of rela-
tively new esthetic terms: precision, calculation, flawlessness, sim-
plicity, economy. Feeling attaches itself in these new forms to
different qualities than those that made handicraft so entertaining.
Success here consists in the elimination of thd non-essential, rather
than, as in handicraft decoration, in the willing production of
superfluity, contributed by the worker out of his own delight in the
work. The elegance of a mathematical equation, the inevitability of a
series of physical inter-relations, the naked quality of the material
itself, the tight logic of the whole — ^these are the ingredients that
go into the design of machines: and they go equally into products
that have been properly designed for machine production. In handi-
craft it is the worker who is represented : in machine design it is the
work. In handicraft, the personal touch is emphasized, and the im-
print of the worker and his tool are both inevitable: in machine

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 351

work the impersonal prevails, and if the worker leaves any tell-tale
evidence of his part in the operation, it is a defect or a flaw. Hence
the burden of machine design is in the making of the original pattern:
it is here that trials are made, that errors are discovered and buried,
that the creative process as a whole is concentrated. Once the master-
pattern is set, the rest is routine: beyond the designing room and
the laboratory there is — for goods produced on a serial basis for a
mass market — ^no opportunity for choice and personal achievement.
Hence apart from those commodities that can be produced automati-
cally, the effort of sound industrial production must be to increase
the province of the designing room and the laboratory, reducing
the scale of the production, and making possible an easier passage
back and forth between the designing and the operative sections of
the plant.

Who discovered these new canons of machine design? Many an
engineer and many a machine worker must have mutely sensed them
and reached toward diem: indeed, one sees the beginning of them in
very early mechanical instruments. But only after centuries of more
or less blind and unformulated effort were these canons finally dem-
onstrated with a certain degree of completeness in the work of the
great engineers toward the end of the nineteenth century — ^particu-
larly the Roeblings in America and Eiffel in France — and formu-
lated after that by theoreticians like Riedler and Meyer in Germany.
The popularization of the new esthetic awaited, as I have pointed
out, the post-impressionist painters. They contributed by breaking
away from the values of purely associative art and by abolishing
an undue concern for natural objects as the basis of the painter’s
interest: if on one side this led to completer subjectivism, on the
other it tended toward a recognition of the machine as both form
and symbol. In the same direction Marcel Duchamp, for example,
who was one of the leaders of this movement, made a collection of
cheap, ready-made articles, produced by the machine, and called
attention to their esthetic soundness and suflSciency. In many cases,
the finest designs had been achieved before any conscious recog-
nition of the esthetic had taken place. With the coming of a commer-
cialized designer, seeking to add “art” to a product which was art,

352

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the design has more often than not been trifled with and spoiled. The
studious botching of the kodak, the bathroom fixture, and the steam
radiator under such stylicizing is a current commonplace.

The key to this fresh appreciation of the machine as a source
of new esthetic forms has come through a formulation of its chief
esthetic principle: the principle of economy. This principle is of
course not unknown in other phases of art: but the point is that in
mechanical forms it is at all times a controlling one, and it has for
its aid the more exact calculations and measurements that are now
possible. The aim of sound design is to remove from the object, be it
an automobile or a set of china or a room, every detail, every mould-
ing, every variation of the surface, every extra part except that which
conduces to its effective functioning. Toward the working out of this
principle, our mechanical habits and our unconscious impulses have
been tending steadily. In departments where esthetic choices are
not consciously uppermost our taste has often been excellent and
sure. Le Corbusier has been very ingenious in picking out manifold
objects, buried from observation by their very ubiquity, in which this
mechanical excellence of form has manifested itself without pretence
or fumbling. Take the smoking pipe: it is no longer carved to look
like a human head nor does it bear, except among college students,
any heraldic emblems: it has become exquisitely anonymous, being
nothing more than an apparatus for supplying drafts of smoke to
the human mouth from a slow-burning mass of vegetation. Take the
ordinary drinking glass in a cheap restaurant: it is no longer cut or
cast or engraved with special designs: at most it may have a slight
bulge near the top to keep one glass from sticking to another in
stacking: it is as clean, as functional, as a high tension insulator. Or
take the present watch and its case and compare it with the forms
that handicraft ingenuity and taste and association created in the
sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. In all the commoner objects of our
environment the machine canons are instinctively accepted: even the
most sentimental manufacturer of motor cars has not been tempted
to paint his coach work to resemble a sedan chair in the style of
Watteau, although he may live in a house in which the furniture and
decoration are treated in that perverse fashion.

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 353

This stripping down to essentials has gone on in every department
of machine work and has touched every aspect of life. It is a first
step toward that completer integration of the machine with human
needs and desires which is the mark of the neotechnic phase, and will
be even more the mark of the biotechnic period, already visible over
the edge of the horizon. As in the social transition from the paleo-
technic to the neotechnic order, the chief obstacle to the fuller de-
velopment of the machine lies in the association of taste and fashion
with waste and commercial profiteering. For the rational develop-
ment of genuine technical standards, based on function and per-
formance, can come about only by a wholesale devaluation of the
scheme of bourgeois civilization upon which our present system of
production is based.

Capitalism, which along with war played such a stimulating part
in the development of technics, now remains with war the chief
obstacle toward its further improvement. The reason should be plain.
The machine devaluates rarity: instead of producing a single unique
object, it is capable of producing a million others just as good as
the master model from which the rest are made. The machine de-
valuates age: for age is another token of rarity, and the machine,
by placing its emphasis upon fitness and adaptation, prides itself on
the brand-new rather than on the antique: instead of feeling com-
fortably authentic in the midst of rust, dust, cobwebs, shaky parts, it
prides itself on the opposite qualities — slickness, smoothness, gloss,
cleanness. The machine devaluates archaic taste: for taste in the
bourgeois sense is merely another name for pecuniary reputability,
and against that standard the machine sets up the standards of
function and fitness. The newest, the cheapest, the commonest objects
may, from the standpoint of pure esthetics, be immensely superior
to the rarest, the most expensive, and the most antique. To say all
this is merely to emphasize that the modern technics, by its own
essential nature, imposes a great purification of esthetics: that is,
it strips off from the object all the barnacles of association, all the
sentimental and pecuniary values which have nothing whatever to do
with esthetic form, and it focusses attention upon the object itself.

The social devaluation of caste, enforced by the proper use and

354 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

appreciation of the machine, is as important as the stripping down
of essential forms in the process itself. One of the happiest signs of
this during the last decade was the use of cheap and common ma-
terials in jewelry, first introduced, I believe, by Lalique: for this
implied a recognition of the fact that an estheticaUy appropriate
form, even in the adornment of the body, has nothing to do with
rarity or expense, but is a matter of color, shape, line, texture, fitness,
symbol. The use of cheap cottons in dress by Chanel and her imita-
tors, which was another post-war phenomenon, was an equally happy
recognition of the essential values in our new economy: it at last
put our civilization, if only momentarily, on the level of those primi-
tive cultures which gladly bartered their furs and ivory for the
white man’s colored glass beads, by the adroit use of which the
savage artist often proved to any disinterested observer that they —
contrary to the white man’s fatuous conceit — ^had gotten the better
of the bargain. Because of the fact that woman’s dress has a peculiarly-
compensatory role to play in our megalopolitan society, so that it
more readily indicates what is absent than calls attention to- what
is present in it, the victory for genuine esthetics could only be a
temporary one. But these forms of dress and jewelry pointed to the
goal of machine production: the goal at which each object would be
valued in terms of its direct mechanical and vital and social function,
apart from its pecuniary status, the snobberies of caste, or the dead
sentiments of historical emulation.

This warfare between a sound machine esthetic and what Veblen
has called the ‘‘requirements of pecuniary reputability” has still an-
other side. Our modern technology has, in its inner organization,
produced a collective economy and its typical products are collective
products. Whatever the politics of a country may be, the machine is
a communist: hence the deep contradictions and conflicts that have
kept on developing in machine industry since the end of the eighteenth
century. At every stage in technics, the work represents a collabora-
tion of innumerable workers, themselves utilizing a large and ramify-
ing technological heritage: the most ingenious inventor, the most
brilliant individual scientist, the most skilled designer contributes
but a moiety to the final result. And the product itself necessarily

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 355

bears the same impersonal imprint: it either functions or it does not
function on quite impersonal lines. There can be no qualitative differ-
ence between a poor man’s electric bulb of a given candlepower and
a rich man’s, to indicate their differing pecuniary status in society,
although there was an enormous difference between the rush or
stinking tallow of the peasant and the wax candles or sperm oil used
by the upper classes before the coming of gas and electricity.

In so far as pecuniary differences are permitted to count in the
machine economy, they can alter only the scale of things — not, in
terms of present production, the kind. What applies to electric light
bulbs applies to automobiles: what applies there applies equally to
every manner of apparatus or utility. The frantic attempts that have
been made in America by advertising agencies and “designers” to
stylicize machine-made objects have been, for the most part, at-
tempts to pervert the machine process in the interests of caste and
pecuniary distinction. In money-ridden societies, where men play
with poker chips instead of with economic and esthetic realities,
every attempt is made to disguise the fact that the machine has
achieved potentially a new collective economy, in which the posses-
sion of goods is a meaningless distinction, since the machine can
produce all our essential goods in unparalleled qualities, falling on
the just and the unjust, the foolish and the wise, like the rain itself.

The conclusion is obvious: we cannot intelligently accept the
practical benefits of the machine without accepting its moral impera-
tives and its esthetic forms. Otherwise both ourselves and our society
will be the victims of a shattering disunity, and one set of purposes,
that which created the order of the machine, will be constantly at
war with trivial and inferior personal impulses bent on working out
in covert ways our psychological weaknesses. Lacking on the whole
this rational acceptance, we have lost a good part of the practical
benefits of the machine and have achieved esthetic expression only
in a spotty, indecisive way. The real social distinction of modern
technics, however, is that it tends to eliminate social distinctions. Its
immediate goal is effective work. Its means are standardization: the
emphasis of the generic and the typical: in short, conspicuous econ-

356 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

omy. Its ultimate aim is leisure — ^that is, the release of other organic

capacities.

The powerful esthetic side of this social process has been obscured
by speciously pragmatic and pecuniary interests that have inserted
themselves into our technology and have imposed themselves upon
its legitimate aims. But in spite of this deflection of effort, we have
at last begun to realize these new values, these new forms, these new
modes of expression. Here is a new environment — man’s extension
of nature in terms discovered by the close observation and analysis
and abstraction of nature. The elements of this environment are hard
and crisp and clear: the steel bridge, the concrete road, the turbine
and the alternator, the glass wall. Behind the facade are rows and
rows of machines, weaving cotton, transporting coal, assembling
food, printing books, machines with steel fingers and lean muscular
arms, with perfect reflexes, sometimes even with electric eyes. Along-
side them are the new utilities — ^the coke oven, the transformer,
the dye vats — chemically cooperating with these mechanical pro-
cesses, assembling new qualities in chemical compoimds and ma-
terials. Every effective part in this whole environment represents an
effort of the collective mind to widen the province of order and con-
trol and provision. And here, finally, the perfected forms begin to
hold human interest even apart from their practical performances:
they tend to produce that inner composure and equilibrium, that
sense of balance between the inner impulse and the outer environ-
ment, which is one of the marks of a work of art. The machines,
even when they are not works of art, underlie our art — ^that is, our
organized perceptions and feelings — in the way that Nature under-
lies them, extending the basis upon which we operate and confirming
our own impulse to order. The economic: the objective: the collective:
and finally the integration of these principles in a new conception of
the organic — ^these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimi-
lation of the machine not merely as an instrument of practical action
but as a valuable mode of life.

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE

357

6: The Simplification of the Environment

As a practical instrument, the machine has enormously compli-
cated the environment. When one compares the shell of an eighteenth
century house with the tangle of water-pipes, gas-pipes, electric wires,
sewers, aerials, ventilators, heating and cooling systems that compose
a modern house, or when one compares the cobblestones of the old-
fashioned street, set directly 'on the earth, with the cave of cables,
pipes, and subway systems that run under the asphalt, one has no
doubt about the mechanical intricacy of modern existence.

But precisely because there are so many physical organs, and
because so many parts of our environment compete constantly for
our attention, we need to guard ourselves against the fatigue of deal-
ing with too many objects or being stimulated unnecessarily by their
presence, as we perform the numerous oiffices they impose. Hence a
simplification of the externals of the mechanical world is almost a
prerequisite for dealing with its internal complications. To reduce
the constant succession of stimuli, the environment itself must be
made as neutral as possible. This, again, is partly in opposition to
the principle of many handicraft arts, where the effort is to hold the
eye, to give the mind something to play with, to claim a special
attention for itself. So that if the canon of economy and the respect
for function were not rooted in modem technics, it would have to be
derived from our psychological reaction to the machine: only by
esthetically observing these principles can the chaos of stimuli be
reduced to the point of effective assimilation.

Without standardization, without repetition, without the neutral-
izing effect of habit, our mechanical environment might well, by
reason of its tempo and its continuous impact, he too formidable: in
departments which have not been sufficiently simplified it exceeds
the limit of toleration. The machine has thus, in its esthetic manifes-
tations, something of the same effect that a conventional code of
manners has in social intercourse: it removes the strain of contact
and adjustment. The standardization of manners is a psychological
shock-absorber: it permits intercourse between persons and groups
to take place without the preliminary exploration and understanding

358 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

that are requisite for an ultimate adjustment. In the province of
esthetics, this simplification has still a further use: it gives small
deviations and variations from the prevalent norm the psychological
refreshment that would go only with much larger changes under a
condition where variation was the expected mode and standardization
was the exception. Mr. A. N. Whitehead has pointed out that one of
our chief literary sins is in thinking of past and future in terms
of a thousand years forward and backward, when really to experi-
ence the organic nature of past and future one should think of time
in the order of a second, or a fraction of a second. One can make a
similar remark about our esthetic perceptions: those who complain
about the standardization of the machine are used to thinking of
variations in terms of gross changes in pattern and structure, such
as those that take place between totally different cultures or genera-
tions; whereas one of the signs of a rational enjoyment of the ma-
chine and the machine-made environment is to be concerned with
much smaller differences and to react sensitively to them.

To feel the difference between two elemental types of window,
with a slightly different ratio in the division of lights, rather than to
feel it only when one of them is in a steel frame and the other is
surmounted by a broken pediment, is the mark of a fine esthetic
consciousness in our emerging culture. Good craftsmen have always
had some of this finer sense of form; but it was confused by the snob-
bish taste and arbitrary literary standards of form that came into
court life during the Renascence. As the various parts of our environ-
ment become more standardized, the senses must in turn become
more acute, more refined: a hair’s breadth, a speck of dirt, a faint
wave in the surface will distress us as much as the pea hurt Hans
Andersen’s princess, and similarly pleasure will derive from deli-
cacies of adaptation to which most of us are now indifferent. Stand-
ardization, which economizes our attention when our minds have
other work to do, serves as the substratum in those departments where
we deliberately seek esthetic satisfaction.

In creating the machine, we have set before ourselves a positively
inhuman standard of perfection. No matter what the occasion, the
criterion of successful mechanical form is that it should look as if

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 359

no human hand had touched it. In that effort, in that boast, in that
achievement the human hand shows itself, perhaps, in its most cun-
ning manifestation. And yet ultimately it is to the human organism
that we must return to achieve tlie final touch of perfection: the
finest reproduction still lacks something that the original picture
possessed: the finest porcelain produced with the aid of every me-
chanical accessory lacks the perfection of the great Chinese potters:
the finest mechanical printing lacks that complete union of black
and white that hand-printing produces with its slower method and
its dampened paper. Very frequently, in machine work, the best
structure is forfeited to the mere conveniences of production:
given equally high standards of performance, the machine can
often no more than hold its own in competition with the hand product.
The pinnacles of handicraft art set a standard that the machine
must constantly hold before it; but against this one must recognize
that in a hundred departments examples of supreme skill and refine-
ment have, thanks to the machine, become a commonplace. And at
all levels, this esthetic refinement spreads out into life: it appears
in surgery and dentistry as well as in the design of houses and
bridges and high-tension power lines. The direct effect of these
techniques upon the designers, workers, and manipulators cannot be
over-estimated. Whatever the tags, archaicisms, verbalisms, emotional
and intellectual mischiefs of our regnant system of education, the
machine itself as a constant educator cannot be neglected. If during
the paleotechnic period the machine accentuated the brutality of the
mine, in the neotechnic phase it promises, if we use it intelligently, to
restore the delicacy and sensitivity of the organism.

7 : The Objective Personality

Granting these new instruments, this new environment, these new
perceptions and sensations and standards, this new daily routine,
these new esthetic responses — ^what sort of man comes out of modem
technics? Le Play once asked his auditors what was the most im-
portant thing that came out of the mine; and after one had guessed
coal and another iron and another gold, he answered: No, the most
important thing that comes out of the mine is the miner. That is

360 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

true for every occupation. And today every type of work has been

afiected by the machine.

I have already discussed, in terms of their limitations and renun-
ciations, the type of man that influenced modern mechanization;
the monk, the soldier, the miner, the financier. But the fuller experi-
ence of the machine does not necessarily tend to produce a repetition
of these original patterns — although there is plenty of evidence to
show that the soldier and the financier occupy a larger position in
our world today than at perhaps any other time in the past. In the
act of expressing themselves with the aid of the machine, the capa-
cities of these original types have been modified and their character
altered; moreover, what was once the innovation of a daring race
of pioneers has now become the settled routine of a vast mass of
people who have taken over the habits without having shared any
of the original enthusiasm, and many of the latter still perhaps have
no special bent toward the machine. It is difficult to analyze out such
a pervasive influence as this: no single cause is at work, no single
reaction can be attributed solely to the machine. And we who live
in this medium, and who have been formed by it, who constantly
breathe it and adapt ourselves to it, cannot possibly .measure the
deflection caused by the medium, still less estimate the drift of
the machine, and all it carries witli it, from other norms. The only
partial corrective is to examine a more primitive environment, as
Mr. Stuart Chase attempted to do; but even here one cannot correct
for the way in which our very questions and our scale of values have
been altered by our traffic with the machine.

But between the personality that was most effective in the techni-
cally immature environment of the tenth century and the type that
is effective today, one may say that the first was subjectively con-
ditioned, and that the second is more directly influenced by objective
situations. These, at all events, seem to be the tendencies. In both
types of personality there was an external standard of reference : but
whereas the medieval man determined reality by the extent to which
it agreed with a complicated tissue of beliefs, in the case of modern
man the final arbiter of judgment is always a set of facts, recourse
to which is equally open and equally satisfactory to all normally

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 361

constituted organisms. With those that do not accept such a common
substratum neither rational argument nor rational cooperation is
possible. Moreover, matters that lie outside this verification in terms
of fact have for the modern mind a lower order of reality, no matter
how great the presumption, how strong the inner certainty, how pas-
sionate the interest. An angel and a high-frequency wave are equally
invisible to the mass of mankind: but the reports of angels have
come from only a limited number of human receptors, whereas by
means of suitable apparatus communication between a sending and
a receiving station can be inspected and checked up by any competent
human being.

The technique of creating a neutral world of fact as distinguished
from the raw data of immediate experience was the great general
contribution of modem analytic science. This contribution was pos-
sibly second only to the development of our original language con-
cepts, which built up and identified, with the aid of a common
symbol, such as tree or man, the thousand confused and partial
aspects of trees and men that occur in direct experience. Behind
this technique, however, stands a special collective morality: a
rational confidence in the work of other men, a loyalty to the reports
of the senses, whether one likes them or not, a willingness to accept
a competent and unbiased interpretation of the results. This recourse
to a neutral judge and to a constructed body of law was a belated
development in thought comparable to that which took place in
morality when the blind conflicts between biassed men were replaced
by the civil processes of justice. The collective process, even allowing
for the accumulation of error and for the unconscious bias of the
neutral instrument itself, gave a higher degree of certainty than the
most forthright and subjectively satisfactory individual judgment.

The concept of a neutral world, untouched by man’s eflPorts, indif-
ferent to his activities, obdurate to his wish and supplication, is one
of the great triumphs of man’s imagination, and in itself it represents
a fresh human value. Minds of the scientific order, even before
Pythagoras, must have had intuitions of this world; but the habit of
thought did not spread over any wide area until the scientific method
and the machine technique had become common: indeed it does not

362 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

begin to emerge with any clearness until the nineteenth century. The
recognition of this new order is one of the main elements in the new
objectivity. It is embodied in a common phrase which now rises to
the lips of everyone when some accident or breakdown occurs in a
process which lies outside everyone’s immediate control: a leak in
a gas tank in an airplane, a delay on a railroad: “That’s that.”
“C’est ga.” “So geht’s.” From machines that have broken down the
same impersonal attitude begins to extend itself to the result of
human negligence or human perversity: a badly cooked meal or the
elopement of one’s sweetheart. These events naturally often provoke
stormy and uncontrollable emotional responses, but instead of mag-
nifying the explosion and giving it more fuel, we tend to subject
the response as well as the event to a common causal interpretation.
The relative passiveness of machine-trained populations during
periods when the industrial system itself has been disrupted, a pas-
siveness that contrasts at times with the behavior of rural populations,
is perhaps the less favorable side of the same objectivity.

Now in any complete analysis of character the “objective” per-
sonality is as much of an abstraction as the “romantic” personality.
What we tend to call objective are those dispositions and attitudes
which accord with the science and technics : but while one must take
care not to confuse the objective or rational personality with the
whole personality, it should be plain that the area of the first has
increased — if only because it represents an adaptation indispensable
to the running of the machine itself. And the adaptation in turn has
further effects: a modulation of emphasis, a matter-of-factness, a
reasonableness, a quiet assurance of a neutral realm in which the
most obdurate differences can be understood, if not composed, is a
mark of the emerging personality. The shrill, the violent, the vocifer-
ous, the purely animal tooth-baring and foot-stamping, paroxysms
of uncritical self-love and uncontrolled hate — all these archaic qual-
ities, which once characterized the leaders of men and their imitators,
are now outside the style of our epoch: their recent revival and at-
tempted sanctification is merely a symptom of that relapse into the
raw primitive on which I dwelt a little while back. When one beholds
these savage qualities today one has the sense of beholding a back-

ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE 363

ward form of life, like the mastodon, or of witnessing the outburst
of a demented personality. Between the fire of such low types and
the ice of the machine one would have to choose the ice. Fortunately,
our choice is not such a narrow one. In the development of the human
character we have reached a point similar to that which we have
attained in technics itself: the point at which we utilize the com-
pletest developments in science and technics to approach once more
the organic. But here again: our capacity to go beyond the machine
rests upon our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have
absorbed the lessons of objectivity^ impersonality^ neutrality^ the
lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our de-
velopment toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly
human.

CHAPTER VIII.

ORIENTATION

1: The Dissolution of “The Machine”

What we call, in its final results, “the machine” was not, we have
seen, the passive by-product of technics itself, developing through
small ingenuities and improvements and finally spreading over the
entire field of social effort. On the contrary, the mechanical discipline
and many of the primary inventions themselves were the result of
deliberate effort to achieve a mechanical way of life: the motive in
back of this was not technical efficiency but holiness, or power over
other men. In the course of development machines have extended these
aims and provided a physical vehicle for their fulfillment.

Now, the mechanical ideology, which directed men’s minds toward
the production of machines, was itself the result of special circum-
stances, special choices and interests and desires. So long as other
values were uppermost, European technology had remained relatively
stable and balanced over a period of three or four thousand years.
Men produced machines partly because they were seeking an issue
from a baffling complexity and confusion, which characterized both
action and thought: partly, too, because their desire for power, frus-
trated by the loud violence of other men, turned finally toward
the neutral world of brute matter. Order had been sought before,
again and again in other civilizations, in drill, regimentation, inflexi-
ble social regulations, the discipline of caste and custom: after the
seventeenth century it was sought in a series of external instruments
and engines. The Western European conceived of the machine be-
cause he wanted regularity, order, certainty, because he wished to

reduce the movement of his fellows as well as the behavior of the

364

ORIENTATION

365

environment to a more definite, calculable basis. But, more than an
instrument of practical adjustment, the machine was, from 1750 on,
a goal of desire. Though nominally designed to further the means
of existence, the machine served the industrialist and the inventor
and all the cooperating classes as an end. In a world of flux and dis-
order and precarious adjustment, the machine at least was seized
upon as a finality.

If anything was unconditionally believed in and worshipped dur-
ing the last two centuries, at least by the leaders and masters of so-
ciety, it was the machine; for the machine and the universe were
identified, linked together as they were by the formulae of the mathe-
matical and physical sciences ; and the service of the machine was the
principal manifestation of faith and religion: the main motive of
human action, and the source of most human goods. Only as a reli-
gion can one explain the compulsive nature of the urge toward me-
chanical development without regard for the actual outcome of the
development in human relations themselves: even in departments
where the results of mechanization were plainly disastrous, the most
reasonable apologists nevertheless held that “the machine was here
to stay” — by which they meant, not that history was irreversible, but
that the machine itself was unmodifiable.

Today this unquestioned faith in the machine has been severely
shaken. The absolute validity of the machine has become a conditioned
validity: even Spengler, who has urged the men of his generation
to become engineers and men of fact, regards that career as a sort
of honorable suicide and looks forward to the period when the monu-
ments of the machine civilization will be tangled masses of rusting
iron and empty concrete shells. While for those of us who are more
hopeful both of man’s destiny and that of the machine, the machine
is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our
desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so
far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail
where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious
structure of capitalism.

The decay of this absolute faith has resulted from a variety of
causes. One of them is the fact that the instruments of destruction in-

366 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

geniously contrived in the machine shop and the chemist’s laboratory,
have become in the hands of raw and dehumanized personalities a
standing threat to the existence of organized society itself. Mechanical
instruments of armament and offense, springing out of fear, have
widened the grounds for fear among all the peoples of the world;
and our insecurity against bestial, power-lusting men is too great a
price to pay for relief from the insecurities of the natural environ-
ment. What is the use of conquering nature if we fall a prey to nature
in the form of unbridled men? What is the use of equipping mankind
with mighty powers to move and build and communicate, if the final
result of this secure food supply and this excellent organization is
to enthrone the morbid impulses of a thwarted humanity?

In the development of the neutral valueless world of science, and
in the advance of the adaptive, instrumental functions of the machine,
we have left to the untutored egoisms of mankind the control of the
gigantic powers and engines technics has conjured into existence. In
advancing too swiftly and heedlessly along the line of mechanical
improvement we have failed to assimilate the machine and to co-ordi-
nate it with human capacities and human needs; and by our social
backwardness and our blind confidence that problems occasioned by
the machine could be solved purely by mechanical means, we have
outreached ourselves. When one subtracts from the manifest bless-
ings of the machine the entire amount of energy and mind and time
and resources devoted to the preparation for war — ^to say nothing
of the residual burden of past wars — one realizes the net gain is
dismayingly small, and with the advance of still more eSicient
means of inflicting death is becoming steadily smaller. Our failure
here is the critical instance of a common failure all along the line.

The decay of the mechanical faith has, however, still another
source: namely, the realization that the serviceability of machines
has meant in the past serviceability to capitalist enterprise. We are
now entering a phase of dissociation between capitalism and technics ;
and we begin to see with Thorstein Veblen that their respective inter-
ests, so far from being identical, are often at war, and that the
human gains of technics have been forfeited by perversion in the in-
terests of a pecimiary economy. We see in addition that many of the

ORIENTATION

367

special gains in productivity which capitalism took credit for were in
reality due to quite different agents — collective thought, cooperative
action, and the general habits of order — ^virtues that have no neces-
sary connection with capitalist enterprise. To perfect and extend the
range of machines without perfecting and giving humane direction
to the organs of social action and social control is to create danger-
ous tensions in the structure of society. Thanks to capitalism, the
machine has been over-worked, over-enlarged, over-exploited because
of the possibility of making money out of it. And the problem of
integrating the machine in society is not merely a matter, as I have
already pointed out, of making social institutions keep in step with
the machine: the problem is equally one of altering the nature and
the rhythm of the machine to fit the actual needs of the community.
Whereas the physical sciences had first claim on the good minds of
the past epoch, it is the biological and social sciences, and the po-
litical arts of industrial planning and regional planning and com-
munity planning that now most urgently need cultivation: once they
begin to flourish they will awaken new interests and set new problems
for the technologist. But the belief that the social dilemmas created
by the machine can be solved merely by inventing more machines is
today a sign of half-baked thinking which verges close to quackery.

These symptoms of social danger and decay, arising out of the
very nature of the machine — its peculiar debts to warfare, mining,
and finance — ^have weakened the absolute faith in the machine that
characterized its earlier development.

At the same time, we have now reached a point in the development
of technology itself where the organic has begun to dominate the
machine. Instead of simplifying the organic, to make it intelligibly
mechanical, as was necessary for the great eotechnic and paleotechnic
inventions, we have begun to complicate the mechanical, in order to
make it more organic: therefore more effective, more harmonious
with our living environment. For our skill, perfected on the finger
exercises of the machine, would be bored by the mere repetition of
the scales and such childlike imbecilities: supported by the analytic
methods and the skills developed in creating the machine, we can
now approach the larger tasks of synthesis. In short, the machine is

368 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

serving independently, in its neotechnic phase, as a point for a fresh

integration in thought and social life.

While in the past the machine was retarded by its limited historic
heritage, by its inadequate ideology, by its tendency to deny the vital
and the organic, it is now transcending these limitations. And indeed,
as our machines and our apparatus become more subtle, and the
knowledge derived with their aid becomes more delicate and pene-
trating, the simple mechanical analysis of the universe made by the
earlier physicists ceases to represent anything in which the scientist
himself is now interested. The mechanical world-picture is dissolving.
The intellectual medium in which the machine once spawned so
rapidly is being altered at the same time that the social medium —
the point of application — is undergoing a parallel change. Neither
of these changes is yet dominant; neither is automatic or inevitable.
But one can now say definitely, as one could not fifty years ago, that
there is a fresh gathering of forces on the side of life. The claims of
life, once expressed solely by the Romantics and by the more archaic
social groups and institutions of society, are now beginning to be
represented at the very heart of technics itself. Let us trace out some
of the implications of this fact.

2: Toward an Organic Ideology

During the first period of mechanical advance, the application of
simple mechanical analogies to complex organic phenomena helped
the scientist to create a simple framework for experience in general,
including manifestations of life. The ^Veal” from this standpoint was
that which could be measured and accurately defined; and the notion
that reality might in fact be vague, complex, undefinable, perpetually
a little obscure and shifty, did not go with the sure click and move-
ment of machines.

Today this whole abstract framework is in process of reconstruc-
tion. Provisionally, it is as useful to say in science that a simple ele-
ment is a limited kind of organism as it once was to say that an
organism was a complicated kind of machine. ‘^^Newtonian physics,”
as Professor A. N. Whitehead says in Adventures of Ideas, “is based
upon the independent individuality of every bit of matter. Each stone

ORIENTATION

369

is conceived as fully describable apart from any reference to any
other portion of matter. It might be alone in the universe, the sole
occupant of uniform space. Also the stone could be adequately de-
scribed without reference to past or future. It is to be conceived fully
and adequately as wholly constituted within the present moment.”
These independent solid objects of Newtonian physics might move,
touch each other, collide, or even, by a certain stretch of the imagina-
tion, act at a distance: but nothing could penetrate them except in the
limited way that light penetrated translucent substances.

This world of separate bodies, unafEected by the accidents of his-
tory or of geographic location, underwent a profound change with
the elaboration of the new concepts of matter and energy that went
forward from Faraday and von Mayer through Clerk-Maxwell and
Willard Gibbs and Ernest Mach to Planck and Einstein. The discovery
that solids, liquids, and gases were phases of all forms of matter
modified the very conception of substance, while the identification of
electricity, light, and heat as aspects of a protean energy, and the
final break-up of “solid” matter into particles of this same ultimate
energy lessened the gap, not merely between various aspects of the
physical world, but between the mechanical and the organic. Both
matter in the raw and the more organized and internally self-sustain-
ing organisms could be described as systems of energy in more or less
stable, more or less complex, states of equilibrium.

In the seventeenth century the world was conceived as a series of
independent systems. First, the dead world of physics, the world of
matter and motion, subject to accurate mathematical description.
Second, and inferior from the standpoint of factual analysis, was
the world of living organisms, an ill-defined realm, subject to the
intrusion of a mysterious entity, the vital principle. Third, the world
of man, a strange being who was a mechanical automaton with refer-
ence to the.world of physics, but an independent being with a destiny
in heaven from the standpoint of the theologian. Today, instead of
such a series of parallel systems, the world has conceptually become
a single system: if it still cannot be unified in a single formula, it is
even less conceivable without positing an underlying order that
threads through all its manifestations. Those parts of reality that can

370 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

be reduced to patent order, law, quantitative statement are no more
real or ultimate than those parts which remain obscure and illusive:
indeed, when applied at the wrong moment or in the wrong place
dr in a false context the exactness of the description may increase
the error of interpretation.

All our really primary data are social and vital. One begins
with life; and one knows life, not as a fact in the raw, but only
as one is conscious of human society and uses the tools and instru-
ments society has developed through history — ^words, symbols, gram-
mar, logic, in short, the whole technique of communication and
funded experience. The most abstract knowledge, the most impersonal
method, is a derivative of this world of socially ordered values.
And instead of accepting the Victorian myth of a struggle for exist-
ence in a blind and meaningless universe, one must, with Professor
Lawrence Henderson, replace this with the picture of a partnership
in mutual aid, in which the physical structure of matter itself, and
the very distribution of elements on the earth’s crust, their quantity,
their solubility, their specific gravity, their distribution and chemical
combination, are life-furthering and life-sustaining. Even the most
rigorous scientific description of the physical basis of life indicates
it to be internally teleological.

Now changes in our conceptual apparatus are rarely important
or influential unless they are accompanied, more or less independ-
ently, by parallel changes in personal habits and social institutions.
Mechanical time became important because it was re-enforced by the
financial accountancy of capitalism: progress became important as
a doctrine because visible improvements were being rapidly made in
machines. So the organic approach in thought is important today be-
cause we have begun, here and there, to act on these terms even when
unaware of the conceptual implications. This development has gone
on in architecture from Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to the new
architects in Europe, and from Owen and Ebenezer Howard and
Patrick Geddes in city design to the community planners in Holland,
Germany, and Switzerland who have begun to crystallize in a fresh
pattern the whole neotechnic environment. The humane arts of the
physician and the psychologist and the architect, the hygienist and

ORIENTATION

371

the community planner, have begun during the last few decades to
displace the mechanical arts from their hitherto central position in
our economy and our life. Form, pattern, configuration, organism,
historical filiation, ecological relationship are concepts that work up
and down the ladder of the sciences: the esthetic structure and the
social relations are as real as the primary physical qualities that the
sciences were once content to isolate. This conceptual change, then,
is a widespread movement that is going on in every part of society:
in part it arises out of the general resurgence of life — ^the care of
children, the culture of sex, the return to wild nature and the re-
newed worship of the sun — and in turn it gives intellectual re-enforce-
ment to these spontaneous movements and activities. The very struc-
ture of machines themselves, as I pointed out in describing the neo-
technic phase, reflects these more vital interests. We now realize that
the machines, at their best, are lame coimterfeits of living organisms.
Our finest airplanes are crude uncertain approximations compared
with a flying duck: our best electric lamps cannot compare in effi-
ciency with the light of the firefly: our most complicated automatic
telephone exchange is a childish contraption compared with the
nervous system of the human body.

This reawakening of the vital and the organic in every department
undermines the authority of the purely mechanical. Life, which has
always paid the fiddler, now begins to call the tune. Like The
Walker in Robert Frost’s poem, who found a nest of turtle eggs
near a railroad track, we are armed for war:

The next machine that has the power to pass

Will get this plasm on its polished brass.

But instead of being confined to a resentment that destroys life in
the act of hurling defiance, we can now act directly upon the nature
of the machine itself, and create another race of these creatures,
more effectively adapted to the environment and to the uses of life.
At this point, one must go beyond Sombart’s so far excellent analysis.
Sombart pointed out, in a long list of contrasting productions and
inventions, that the clue to modem technology was the displace-
ment of the organic and the living by the artificial and the mechanical.

372 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Within technology itself this process, in many departments, is being
reversed: we are returning to the organic: at all events, we no longer
regard the mechanical as all-embracing and all-suifEcient.

Once the organic image takes the place of the mechanical one,
one may confidently predict a slowing down of the tempo of research,
the tempo of mechanical invention, and the tempo of social change,
since a coherent and integrated advance must take place more slowly
than a one-sided unrelated advance. Whereas the earlier mechanical
world could be represented by the game of checkers, in which a
similar series of moves is carried out by identical pieces, qualitatively
similar, the new world must be represented by chess, a game in
which each order of pieces has a different status, a different value,
and a different function: a slower and more exacting game. By the
same token, however, the results in technology and in society will
be of a more solid nature than those upon which paleotechnic science
congratulated itself: for the truth is that every aspect of the earlier
order, from the slums in which it housed its workers to the towers
of abstraction in which it housed its intellectuals, was jerrybuilt —
hastily clapped together for the sake of immediate profits, immediate
practical success, with no regard for the wider consequences and
implications. The emphasis in future must be, not upon speed and
immediate practical conquest, but upon exhaustiveness, inter-relation-
ship, and integration. The co-ordination of our technical effort — such
co-ordination and adjustment as is pictured for us in the physiology
of the living organism — is more important than extravagant advances
along special lines, and equally extravagant retardations along other
lines, with a disastrous lack of balance and harmony between the
various parts.

The fact is then that, partly thanks to the machine, we have now
an insight into a larger world and a more comprehensive intellectual
synthesis than that which was originally outlined in our mechanical
ideology. We can now see plainly that power, work, regularity, are
adequate principles of action only when they cooperate with a humane
scheme of living: that any mechanical order we can project must fit
into the larger order of life itself. Beyond the necessary intellectual
reconstruction, which is already going on in both science and technics,

ORIENTATION

373

we must build up more organic centers of faith and action in the arts
of society and in the discipline of the personality: this implies a re-
orientation that will take us far beyond the immediate province of
technics itself. These are matters — ^matters touching the building of
communities, the conduct of groups, the development of the arts of
communication and expression, the education and the hygiene of
the personality — ^that I purpose to take up in another book. Here I
will confine attention to co-ordinate readjustments which are clearly
indicated and already partly formulated and enacted in the realm
of technics and industry.

3: The Elements of Social Energetics

Let us examine the implications of neotechnic developments, within
the machine itself, upon our economic objectives, upon the organiza-
tion of work, upon the direction of industry and the goals of con-
sumption, upon the emerging social purposes of the neotechnic phase
of civilization.

First: the economic objectives.

In the course of capitalistic enterprise, which accompanied the
widespread introduction of machines and machine-methods in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the focus of industry shifted from
the craft guild to the merchant guild or the livery company or the
company of merchant adventurers, or to the special organization for
exploiting patent monopolies. The means of exchange usurped the
function and meaning of the things that were exchanged: money
itself became a commodity and money-getting became a specialized
form of activity. Under capitalism profit reigned as the main eco-
nomic objective; and profit became the decisive factor in all indus-
trial enterprise. Inventions that promised profits, industries that
produced profits, were fostered. The reward of capital, if not the
first claim upon productive enterprise, was at all events the domi-
nating one: the service of the consumer and the support of the worker
were entirely secondary. Even in a period of crisis and breakdown,
such as that capitalism is still in the midst of at the moment I
write, dividends continue to be paid to rentiers out of past accumu-
lation while the industry itself often operates at a loss, or the mass

374 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of workers are turned out to starve. Sometimes profits were obtained
by lowering the costs and spreading the product: but if they could
be had only by offering inferior or adulterated goods — as in the
sale of medical nostrums or the slum housing of the underpaid
worker — ^health and well-being were sacrificed to gain. The com-
munity, instead of receiving a full return for its goods and services,
permitted a portion of the product to be diverted for the private
gratification of the holders of land and capital. These holders of
land and capital, backed up by the law and all the instruments of
government, determined privately and solely in accordance with
the canon of profit what should be produced and how much and
where and how and by whom and on what terms.

In the economic analysis of the society that grew up on this basis,
the three main terms in industrial activity were production, distribu-
tion, and consumption. Profits were to be increased by cheaper
production, by wider and multifold distribution, and by a steadily
rising standard of consumptive expenditure, with — sometimes in lieu
of that, sometimes accompanying it — ^an enlarging market of con-
sumers. Saving labor, or cheapening labor by a superiority of bar-
gaining power — obtained by withholding land from the laborer and
monopolizing the new instruments of production — ^were the two chief
means, from the capitalist’s standpoint, of increasing the margin of
profits. Saving labor by rationalization was a real improvement
which bettered everything but the position of the laborer. The
stimulation of the demand for goods was the chief means of increasing
the turnover: hence the problem of capitalism was essentially not to
satisfy needs but to create demands. And the attempt to represent!
this process of private aggrandizement and class-advantage as a
natural and socially beneficent one was perhaps the main labor of
political economists during the nineteenth century.

When one examines economic activities from the standpoint of
the employment of energy and the service of human life, this whole
financial structure of production and consumption turns out to have
mainly a superstitious basis. At the bottom of the structure are
farmer and peasant, who during the entire course of the industrial
revolution, which their increase of the food supply has made possible.

ORIENTATION

375

have scarcely ever received an adequate return for their products — at
least on the basis of pecuniary accountancy by which the rest of this
society was run. Furthermore: what are called gains in capitalist
economics often turn out, from the standpoint of social energetics,
to be losses; while the real gains, the gains upon which all the activ-
ities of life, civilization, and culture ultimately depend were either
counted as losses, or were ignored, because they remained outside
the commercial scheme of accountancy.

What are, then, the essentials of the economic processes in rela-
tion to energy and to life? The essential processes are conversion,
production, consumption, and creation. In the first two steps energy
is seized and prepared for the sustenance of life. In the third stage,
life is supported and renewed in order that it may wind itself up,
so to speak, on the higher levels of thought and culture, instead of
being short-circuited at once back into the preparatory fimctions.
Normal human societies exhibit all four stages of the economic
processes: but their absolute quantities and their proportions vary
with the social milieu.

Conversion has to do with the utilization of the environment as
a source of energy. The prime fact of all economic activity, from
that of the lower organisms up to the most advanced hxunan cultures,
is the conversion of the sun’s energies: this transformation depends
upon the heat-conserving properties of the atmosphere, upon the
geological processes of uplift and erosion and soil-building, upon
the conditions of climate and local topography, and — ^most important
of all — ^upon the green leaf reaction in growing plants. This seizure
of energy is the original source of all our gains: on a purely energetic
interpretation of the process, all that happens after this is a dissipa-
tion of energy — a dissipation that may be retarded, that may be
dammed up, that may he temporarily diverted by human ingenuity,
but in the long run cannot be averted. All the permanent monu-
ments of human culture are attempts, by using more attentuated
physical means of preserving and transmitting this energy, to avert
the hour of ultimate extinction. The most important conquest of
energy was man’s original discovery and utilization of fire; after that,
the most significant transformation of the environment came through

376 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the cultivation of the grain-bearing grasses, the vegetables, and the
domestic animals. Indeed, the enormous increase in population which
took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, before the
machine had made any appreciable change in agriculture, was due
to the opening of immense areas of free land for grain cultivation
and cattle raising and the better provision of winter fodder crops,
combined with the addition of three new energy crops — sugar cane,
sugar beet, and potato — ^to the diet of the industrial population.

The mechanical conversion of energy is second in. importance to
the organic conversion. But in the development of technics the inven-
tion of the water-wheel, the water-turbine, the steam engine, and
the gas engine multiplied the energies that were available to man
through the use of foods grown for himself and his domestic animals.
Without the magnification of human energy made possible through
this series of prime movers, our apparatus of production and trans-
port could not have reached the gigantic scale it attained in the
nineteenth century. All the further steps in the economic process
depend upon the original act of conversion: the level of achievement
can never rise higher than the level of the energy originally con-
verted, and just as only an insignificant p&rt of the sun’s energy
available is utilized in conversion, so only a small part of this, in
turn, finally is utilized in consumption and creation.

Conversion lifts the energy available to a peak; from that point on
energy runs down hill, in gathering and shaping the raw materials,
in transporting supplies and products, and in the processes of con-
sumption itself. Not until the economic process reaches the stage of
creation — ^not until it supplies the human animal with more energy
than he needs to maintain his physical existence, and not until still
other energies are transformed into the more durable media of art
and science and philosophy, of books, buildings and symbols — is
there anything that can be called, even within a limited span of
time, a gain. At one end of the process is the conversion of the free
energy of nature and its transformation into forms useable by agri-
culture and technology: at the other end of the process is the con-
version of the intermediate, preparatory products into human

ORIENTATION

377

subsistence, and into those cultural forms that are useable by succeed-
ing generations of men.

The amount of energy available for the final process depends upon
two facts: how much energy is converted by agriculture and technics
at the beginning, and how much of that energy is effectively applied
and conserved in transmission. Even the crudest society has some
surplus. But under the capitalist system the main use of this surplus
is to serve as profits which are incentives to capital investments,
which in turn increase production. Hence two massive and recurrent
facts in modern capitalism: first, an enormous over-expansion of
plant and equipment. Thus the Hoover Committee on the Elimination
of Waste in Industry found, for example, that clothing factories in
the United States are about 45 per cent larger than necessary; print-
ing establishments are from 50 to 150 per cent over-equipped; and
the shoe industry has a capacity twice that of actual production.
Second: an excessive diversion of energy and man-power into sales
promotion and distribution. Whereas only ten per cent of the work-
ing population in the United States was engaged in transporting and
distributing the commodities produced in 1870, the proportion had
risen to 25 per cent in 1920. Other means of utilizing the sur-
plus, such as the cultural and educational bequests of various phi-
lanthropies, relieve some of the burden of inane waste from both
the individual and from industrial society: but there is no capitalist
theory of non-profit-making enterprises and non-consumable goods.
These functions exist accidentally, by the grace of the philanthropist:
they have no real place in the system. Yet it should be plain that
as society becomes technically mature and civilized, the area occu-
pied by the surplus must become progressively wider: it will be
greater than it occupied under capitalism or under those more
primitive non-capitalist civilizations which — as was pregnantly
demonstrated by Radhakamal Mukerjee — capitalist economics so
inadequately describes.

The permanent gain that emerges from the whole economic process
is in the relatively non-material elements in culture — in the social
heritage itself, in the arts and sciences, in the traditions and processes
of technology, or directly in life itself, in those real enrichments

378 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

that come from the free exploitation of organic energy in thought
and action and emotional experience, in play and adventure and
drama and personal development — gains that last through memory
and communication beyond the immediate moment in which they
are enjoyed. In short, as John Ruskin put it. There is no Wealth but
Life; and what we call wealth is in fact wealth only when it is a sign
of potential or actual vitality.

An economic process that did not produce this margin for leisure,
enjoyment, absorption, creative activity, communication and trans-
mission would completely lack human meaning and reference. In
the histories of human groups there are of course periods, periods
of starvation, periods of flood and earthquake and war, when man
fights a losing fight with his environment, and does not even secure
bare physical survival; and there are moments when the complete
social process is brutally cut short. But even in the most perverse
and degraded forms of life, there is an aspect that corresponds,
vitally and psychally speaking, to “creation,” and even in the most
inadequate forms of production, such as that which prevailed during
the paleotechnic phase, there remains a surplus not arrogated by
industry. Whether this surplus goes to increase the preparatory
processes, or whether it is to be spent on creation, is a choice that
cannot be automatically decided; and the tendency in capitalist
society to put it back quickly into the preparatory processes, and to
make possible increased production by applying pressure to con-
sumption, is merely a further indication of its absence of social
criteria.

The real significance of the machine, socially speaking, does not
consist either in the multiplication of goods or the multiplication
of wants, real or illusory. Its significance lies in the gains of energy
through increased conversion, through efficient production, through
balanced consumption, and through socialized creation. The test of
economic success does not, therefore, lie in the industrial process
alone, and it cannot be measured by the amount of horsepower con-
verted or by the amount commanded by an individual user: for the
important factors here are not quantities but ratios: ratios of mechan-
ical effort to social and cultural results. A society in which production

ORIENTATION

379

and consumption completely cancelled out the gains of conversion —
in which people worked to live and lived to work — ^would remain
socially inefficient, even if the entire population were constantly em-
ployed, and adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered.

The ultimate test of an efiicient industry is the ratio between
productive means and the achieved ends. Hence a society with a low
scale of conversion but with a hi^ amount of creation is humanly
speaking superior to a society with an enormous panoply of con-
verters and a small and inadequate army of creators. By the ruthless
pillage of the food-producing territories of Asia and Africa, the
Roman Empire appropriated far more energy than Greece, with its
sparse abstemious dietary and its low standard of living. But Rome
produced no poem, no statue, no original architecture, no work of
science, no philosophy comparable to the Odyssey, the Parthenon,
the works of sixth and fifth century sculptors, and the science of
Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Hero: and so the quantitative
grandeur and luxury and power of the Romans, despite their extraor-
dinary capacity as engineers, remained relatively meaningless: even
for the continued development of technics the work of the Greek
mathematicians and physicists was more important.

This is why no working ideal for machine production can be
based solely on the gospel of work: still less can it be based upon an
uncritical belief in constantly raising the quantitative standard of
consumption. If we are to achieve a purposive and cultivated use of
the enormous energies now happily at our disposal, we must examine
in detail the processes that lead up to the final state of leisure, free
activity, creation. It is because of the lapse and mismanagement of
these processes that we have not reached the desirable end; and it is
because of our failure to frame a comprehensive scheme of ends
that we have not succeeded in achieving even the beginnings of social
efiEciency in the preparatory work.

How is this margin to be achieved and how is it to be applied?
Already we are faced with political and moral problems as well as
technological ones. There is nothing in the nature of the machine
as such, nothing in the training of the technician as such, that will
provide us with a sufficient answer. We shall of course need his

380 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

help : but in turn he will need help from other quarters of the com-
pass, far beyond the province of technology.

4: Increase Conversion!

Modern technics began in Western Civilization with an increased
capacity for conversion. While society faces a fairly imminent
shortage of petroleum and perhaps natural gas, and while the known
coal beds of the world give no longer promise of life, at the present
rates of consumption, than three thousand years, we face no serious
energy problem that we cannot solve even with our present equip-
ment, provided that we utilize to the full our scientific resources.
Apart from the doubtful possibility of harnessing inter-atomic energy,
there is the much nearer one of utilizing the sun’s energy directly in
sun-converters or of utilizing the difference in temperature between
the lower depths and the surface of the tropical seas: there is like-
wise the possibility of applying on a wide scale new types of wind
turbine, like the rotor: indeed, once an efficient storage battery was
available the wind alone would be sufficient, in all probability, to
supply any reasonable needs for energy.

Along with the renewed use through electricity of wind and water
one must put the destructive distillation of coal, near the pitheads,
in the new types of coke-oven. This not merely saves enormous
amounts in energy now spent in transporting the fuel from the
place where it is mined to the place where it is used, but it also
conserves the precious compounds that now escape into the air in
the wasteful individual furnaces. Theoretically, however, such econ-
omies of energy only lead to wider consumption and so to more
rapid utilization of the very thing we wish to conserve: hence the
necessity for making a socialized monopoly of all such raw materials
and resources. The private monopoly of coal beds and oil wells is
an intolerable anachronism — as intolerable as would be the monopoly
of sun, air, running water. Here the objectives of a price economy
and a social economy cannot be reconciled; and the common owner-
ship of the means of converting energy, from the wooded mountain
regions where the streams have their sources down to the remotest
petroleum wells is the sole safeguard to their effective use and con-

ORIENTATION

381

servation. Only by increasing the amount of energy available, or,
when the amount is restricted, by economizing more cunningly in
its application, shall we be in a position to eliminate freely the
basest forms of drudgery.

What is true for mechanical power production is likewise true
for organic forms of power production, such as the growing of foods
and the extraction of raw materials from the soil. In this department
capitalistic society has confused ownership with security of tenure
and continuity of effort, and in the very effort to foster ownership
while maintaining the speculative market it has destroyed security
of tenure. It is the latter condition that is necessary for conservative
farming; and not until the community itself holds the land will the
position of the farmer be a desirable one. The negative side of
this socialization of the land — ^namely, the purchase of marginal
land, unfit for any other purpose than forest growth — ^has already
been taken up, for example, by the State of New York. It remains to
accomplish a similar end on the positive side by taking over and
appropriately planning for maximum cultivation and enjoyment the
good agricultural lands.

Such ownership and planning by the community do not necessarily
mean large-scale farming: for the efficient economic units differ with
the type of farming, and the large mechanized units suitable to the
cultivation of the wheatlands of the prairies are in fact inappropriate
to other types of farming. Neither does such a system of rationaliza-
tion inevitably mean the extinction of the small family farming
group, with the skill and initiative and general intelligence that dis-
tinguishes the farmer favorably from the over-specialized factory
worker of the old style. But the permanent zoning of certain areas
for certain types of agriculture, and the experimental determination
of the types of crop appropriate to a particular region or a particular
section are matters that cannot be left to guess, chance, or blind
individual initiative: they are, on the contrary, complicated technical
questions in which objective answers are possible. In long-settled
areas, like the various wine-growing sections of France, soil utiliza-
tion surveys will probably only confirm existing types of effort: but
wherever there is a question of choice between types of use, the

382 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

decision cannot be left to the chance interests of individuals. The
first step toward rationalization in agriculture is the common owner-
ship of the land. Such ownership prevailed in Europe under cus-
tomary forms dowm to the nineteenth century in certain regions; and
its restoration involves no breach whatever with the essential founda-
tions of rural life.

The private appropriation and exploitation of the land, indeed,
must be looked upon as a transitory state, peculiar to capitalism,
between customary local agriculture based upon the common needs
of the small local community and a rationed world agriculture,
based upon the cooperative resources of the entire planet, consid-
ered as a federation of balanced regions. The fact that, except in
times of extreme scarcity, the farmer is pauperized or ruined by the
abundance of his crops only emphasizes the point that a more stable
basis for agricultural production must be found: a basis that does
not rely upon the individual guesses of the farmer, the caprices of
nature, and the speculative fluctuations of the world market. Within
any given period price tends to vary inversely with the quantity
available: here as elsewhere monetary values disappear toward zero
as vital values and energies rise. Hence the need for rationing, for
stable crops, and for an altogether new system of determining price
and marketability. I shall go into this last point presently. It is
enough to point out here that with the development of balanced eco-
nomic regions, agricultural production will be related to a stable
local market, the sudden gluts and shortages that arise with transpor-
tation to distant centers will disappear, and further to regularize pro-
duction, a good part of the more delicate crops will be grown in small
units, possibly, as in Holland, under glass, near the place of con-
sumption.

To increase conversion, then, is no simple matter of merely mining
coal or building more dynamos. It involves the social appropriation
‘ of natural resources, the replanning of agriculture and the maximum
utilization of those regions in which kinetic energy in the form of
sun, wind, and running water is abundantly available. The sociali-
zation of these sources of energy is a condition of their effective and
purposive use.

ORIENTATION

383

5: Economize Production!

The application of power to production and the employment of
quick and relatively tireless machines to perform manual movement
and the organization of rapid transport and the concentration of
work into factories were the chief means adopted during the nine-
teenth century to increase the quantity of commodities available.
And the goal of this development within the factory was the complete
substitution of non-human power for man power, of mechanical skill
for human skill, of automatons for workers, in every department
where this was possible. Where the absence of human feelings or
intelligence did not manifest itself in an inferiority of the product
itself, that goal was a legitimate one.

The mechanical elements in production were rationalized much
more rapidly than the human elements. In fact, one might almost
say that the human elements were irrationalized at the same time;
for the stimuli to production, human fellowship, an esprit de corps^
the hope of advancement and mastery, the appreciation of the entire
process of work itself, were all reduced or wiped out at the very
moment that the work itself, through its subdivision, ceased to give
any independent gratification. Only the pecuniary interest in produc-
tion remained; and the majority of mankind, unlike the avaricious
and ambitious spirits who marched to the head of industry, are ap-
parently so irresponsive to this pecuniary stimulus that the directing
classes relied upon the lash of starvation, rather than upon the
pleasures of surfeit, to drive them back to the machine.

Collective instruments of production were created and used, with-
out the benefit of a collective will and a collective interest. That, to
begin with, was a serious handicap upon* productive efficiency. The
workers grudged the efforts they gave to the machine, applied them-
selves with half a mind, loitered and loafed when there was an
opportunity to escape the eye of the foreman or the taskmaster,
sought to give as little as they could in return for as much wages as
they could get. So far from attempting to combat these sources of
inefficiency, the enterprisers sanctioned it by relieving the worker
of such autonomy and responsibility as might naturally adhere to

384 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the job, by insisting upon speed for the sake of cheapness without
regard for the excellence of workmanship, and by managing industry
with an eye solely upon the maximum cash return. There were excep-
tions in every industry; but they did not establish the main line.

Not appreciating the gain to efficiency from collective loyalty and
collective interest and a strong common drive, the great industrialists
did their best to browbeat any of these incipient responses out of the
worker: by lockouts, by ruthless warfare in strikes, by hard bargains
in wages and by callous layoffs during periods of slack work the
typical employers of labor did their ignorant best to decrease the
efficiency of the workers and throw sand in the works. These tactics
greatly increased the labor turnover and therefore lowered the
internal efficiency of operation: even such a moderate improvement
in the wage scale as Ford introduced in Detroit had a powerful
effect in lessening such losses. But what shall one say to the efficiency
of a productive system in which strikes and lockouts in the United
States, according to Polakov, at the beginning of the last decade,
averaged 54 million man-days of idleness per year? Hae loss and
inefficiency due to the failure to create a cooperative pattern of
human relations which would supplement that of the machine in-
dustry itself cannot be estimated : but the success of such occasional
mutations within the capitalist system as the Cadbury Cocoa works
at Boumeville, the Godin steel works at Guise — ^an adaptation of
Fourier’s scheme for a cooperative phalanstery — and the Dennison
paper manufacturing works at Framingham, Massachusetts, gives a
slight indication of what our total efficiency would have been had
social relations themselves been rationalized at the time the machine
was introduced. It is evident, at all events, that a good part of our
mechanical adroitness has been annulled by social friction, waste,
and xmnecessary human wear and tear. Testimony to that effect
comes from the production engineers themselves.

At the end of the nineteenth century a new attack upon the problem
of efficiency in production was made within the factory: it was no
accident perhaps that the distinguished engineer who initiated it
was also the co-inventor of a new high-speed tool steel, a characteristic
neotechnic advance. Instead of studying the machine as an isolated

ORIENTATION

385

unit, Taylor studied the worker himself as an element in production.
By a close factual study of his movements, Taylor was able to add
to the labor output per man without adding to his physical burden.
The time and motion studies that Taylor and his followers introduced
have now, with the development of serial processes and greater
automatism, become somewhat outmoded: their importance lay in the
fact that they directed attention to the industrial process as a whole
and treated the worker as an integral element in it. Their weakness
lay in the fact that they accepted the aims of capitalist production
as fixed, and they were compelled to rely upon a narrow pecuniary
incentive — ^with piecework production and bonuses — ^to achieve the
mechanical gains that were possible.

The next step toward the genuine rationalization of industry lies
in widening the interests and increasing the social incentives to pro-
duction. On one hand, this means the reduction of trivial and degrad-
ing forms of work: it likewise means the elimination of products
that have no real social use, since there is no form of cruelty for a
rational human being worse than making him produce goods that
have no human value: picking oakum is by comparison an edifying
task. In addition, the stimulation of invention and initiative within
the industrial process, the reliance upon group activity and upon
intimate forms of social approval, and the transformation of work
into education, and of the social opportunities of factory production
into effective forms of political action — all these incentives toward
a humanly controlled and effectively directed industrial production
await the formulation of non-capitalist modes of enterprise. Taylor-
ism, though it had within its technique the germ of a revolutionary
change in industry, was reduced to a minor instrument in almost
every country except Russia. But it is precisely in the political and
psychological relations of the worker to the industry that the most
effective economies have still to be made. This has been excellently
illustrated in an experiment in a Westinghouse plant described by
Professor Elton Mayo. By paying attention to the conditions of
work and by providing rest periods, the efficiency of a group of
woi'kers was steadily raised. After a certain period of experiment,
the group was put back in the original condition of work without

386 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

rest periods: still the output was greater than it had been originally.
What had happened? There was a feeling among the operatives,
according to the observer, that “better output is in some way related
to the distinctively pleasanter, freer, and happier working condi-
tions.” This is a long stage beyond Taylor’s original mechanical
motion study. And it points to a factor of efficiency in socialized
industry, in which the worker himself is fully respected, which capi-
talism at its most enlightened best can scarcely more than touch. (Is
not this human factor perhaps one of the reasons why small scale
industry — in addition to its lower overhead — can still often com-
pete with large scale industry, where monopoly does not favor the
latter? )

Meanwhile, modem production has added enormously to the pro-
ductive output without adding a single horsepower or a single
machine or a single workman. What have been the means? On one
hand there have been great gains through mechanical articulation
within the factory, and through the closer organization of raw ma-
terials, transport, storage, and utilization in the factory itself. By
timing, working out economic sequences, creating an orderly pattern
of activity, the engineer has added enormously to the collective
product. By transferring power from human organisms to machines,
he has decreased the number of variable factors and integrated the
process as a whole. These are the gains of organization and adminis-
tration. The other set of gains has come through standardization
and serial production. This involves the reduction of a whole group
of different articles, in which differences did not correspond to
essential qualities, to a limited number of types: once these types
can be established and suitable machines devised to processing and
manufacturing them the process can approach more and more closely
to automatism. The dangers here lie in premature standardization;
and in making assembled objects — ^like automobiles — so completely
standardized that they cannot be improved without a wholesale scrap-
ping of the plant. This was the costly mistake that was made in the
Ford Model T. But in all the ranges of production where typification
is possible large productive economies can be achieved by that
method alone.

ORIENTATION

387

One returns to the illustration originally used by Babbage. The
stone could be moved without skill or organized effort by exerting 753
pounds of effort: or it might be moved, by adapting appropriately
every part of the environment, by using only twenty-two pounds.
In its crude state, industry prides itself upon its gross use of power
and machinery. In its advanced state it rests upon rational organi-
zation, social control, physiological and psychological understanding.
In the first case, it relies upon the external exercise of power in its
political relations: indeed, it prides itself upon surmounting the
friction which with such superb ineptitude it creates. In the second
state, no part of the works can remain immune to criticism and
rational criteria: the goal is no longer as much production as is
compatible with the canons of private enterprise and private profit
and individual money- incentives: it is rather efficient production for
social uses no matter how drastically these sacred canons must be
revised or extirpated.

In a word, to economize production, we cannot begin or end with
the physical machines and utilities themselves, nor can efficient pro-
duction begin and end in the individual factory or industry. The
process involves an integration of the worker, the industrial function,
and the product, just as it involves a further co-ordination between
the sources of supply and the final consumptive outlets. At hardly
any point in our present system of production have we begun to
utilize the latent energies that are available through organization
and social control: at best, here and there, we have just begun to
sample such efficiencies.

If we have only begun to utilize the latent energies of the personnel,
it is equally true that the geographic distribution of industries,
hitherto governed by accidental choices and opportunities, has still
to be worked out rationally in terms of the world’s resources and
the re-settlement of the world’s population into the areas marked
as favorable for human living. Here, through economic regionalism,
a new series of economies offers itself.

The accidents of original manufacture or of the original location
of resources cannot continue as guiding factors in growth when new
sources of supply and new distribution of markets are recognized.

388 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Moreover, the ileotechnic distribution of power makes for economic
regionalism: the concentration of population in the coal towns and
the port towns was a mark of a haphazardly organized labor supply
and of the high cost of coal transportation. One of the large possi-
bilities for economy here lies in tlie abolition of cross-hauls: the
familiar process of carrying coals to Newcastle. Traders and middle-
men gain by lengthening the distance in space and time between the
producer and the ultimate consumer. Under a rationally planned
distribution of industry, this parasitism in transit would be reduced
to a minimum. And as the knowledge of modern technics spreads,
the special advantages in skill and organization and science, once
enjoyed by a few countries alone, by England during the nineteenth
century above all, tend to become the common property of mankind
at large: for ideas are not stopped by customs barriers or freight
rates. Our modern world, transporting knowledge and skill, has
diminished the need for transporting goods: St. Louis’s shoes are as
good as New England’s, and French textiles are as good as English.
In a balanced economy, regional production of commonplace com-
modities becomes rational production; and inter-regional exchange
becomes the export of the surplus from regions of increment to
regions of scarcity, or the exchange of special materials and skills —
like Tungsten, manganese, fine china, lenses — ^not miversally found
or developed throughout the world. But even here the advantages of
a particular place may remain temporary. While American and
German camembert cheese is still vastly inferior to the French
variety, the gruyere cheese produced in Wisconsin compares favor-
ably with that produced in Switzerland. With the growth of economic
regionalism, the advantages of modem industry will be spread, not
chiefly by transport — as in the nineteenth century — ^but by local
development.

The prime examples of conscious economic regionalism up to
the present have come from countries like Ireland and Denmark,
or states like Wisconsin, where the occupations were predominantly
agricultural, and where a flourishing economic life depended upon
an intelligent exploitation of all the regional resources. But economic
regionalism does not aim at complete self-sufiiciency; even under the

ORIENTATION

389

most primitive conditions no region has ever been economically
self-sufficient in all respects. On the other hand, economic regionalism
does aim at combating the evil of over-specialization: since what-
ever the temporary commercial advantages of such specialization it
tends to impoverish the cultural life of a region and, by placing
all its eggs in one basket, to make precarious ultimately its economic
existence. Just as every region has a potential balance of animal
life and vegetation, so it has a potential social balance between indus-
try and agriculture, between cities and farms, between built-up spaces
and open spaces. A region entirely specialized for a single resource,
or covered from boundary line to boundary line by a solid area
of houses and streets, is a defective environment, no matter how
well its trade may temporarily flourish. Economic regionalism is
necessary to provide for a varied social life, as well as to provide
for a balanced economy.

Plainly, a good part of the activity and business and power of
the modern world, in which the nineteenth century took so much
pride, was the result of disorganization, ignorance, inefficiency and
social ineptitude. But the spread of technical knowledge, standardized
methods, and scientifically controlled performances diminishes the
need for transportation: in the new economy the old system of re-
gional over-specialization will become the exception rather than the
rule. Even today England is no longer the workshop of the world,
and New England is no longer the workshop of America. And as
mechanical industry becomes more highly rationalized and more
finely adapted to the environment, a varied and many-sided indus-
trial life tends to develop within each natural human region.

To achieve all these possible gains in production takes us far
beyond the individual factory or industry, far beyond the current
tasks of the administrator or engineer: it requires the services of the
geographer and the regional planner, the psychologist, the educator,
the sociologist, the skilled political administrator. Perhaps Russia
alone at present has the necessary framework for this planning in
its fundamental institutions; but to one degree or another, pushed
by the necessity for creating order out of the existing chaos and dis-
organization, other countries are moving in the same direction: the

390

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Zuyder Zee reclamation in Holland, for example, is an example of
the multifold rationalization of industry and agriculture and the
building up of economic regional units here indicated.

The older modes of production have exploited only the superficial
processes that were capable of being mechanized and externally
ordered: whereas a bolder social economy will touch every aspect
of the industrial complex. Complete organization of the mechanical
elements, with ignorance, accident, and uncriticized custom dominant
in society as a whole, was the formula of capitalistic enterprise
during its earlier phases. That formula belongs to the past. It
achieved only a small part of the potential production that even the
crude machine age of the past was capable of, provided that it could
have removed the frictions and contradictions and cross-purposes that
perpetually impeded the flow of goods from source to mouth. To
achieve efficiency in the past was as self-defeating a task as Carlyle’s
famous dilemma — given a band of thieves to produce an honesty
out of their united action. In detail, we will doubtless carry over
many admirable practices and rational arrangements derived from
capitalism: but it is entirely doubtful, so deep are the dissonances,
so inevitable are the frictions, that we shall carry over capitalist
society itself. Humanly speaking, it has worn out its welcome. We
need a system more safe, more flexible, more adaptable, and finally
more life-sustaining than that constructed by our narrow and one-
sided financial economy. Its efilciency was a mere shadow of real
efficiency, its wasteful power was a poor substitute for order; its fever-
ish productivity and its screaming breakdowns, wastes, and jams
were low counterfeits of a functional economy that could really
profit by modern technics.

6: Normalize Consumption!

Whereas we must maximize conversion, in order to have surplus
energies ready to fulfill existing wants, and to be prepared for un-
expected needs, it does not follow that we must also maximize pro-
duction along the existing lines of effort. Tlie aimless expansion of
production is in fact the typical disease of capitalism in its appli-
cation of modem technics: for since it failed to establish norms it

ORIENTATION

391

had no definite measure for its productive achievement and no pos-
sible goals, except those erected by custom and accidental desire.

The expansion of the machine during the past two centuries was
accompanied by the dogma of increasing wants. Industry was directed
not merely to the multiplication of goods and to an increase in their
variety: it was directed toward the multiplication of the desire for
goods. We passed from an economy of need to an economy of acquisi-
tion. The desire for more material satisfactions of the nature fur-
nished by mechanized production kept up with and partly cancelled
out the gains in productivity. Needs became nebulous and indirect:
to satisfy them appropriately under the capitalist criterion one must
gratify them with profitable indirectness through the channels of sale.
The symbol of price made direct seizure and gratification vulgar: so
that finally the farmer who produced enough fruit and meat and
vegetables to satisfy his hunger felt a little inferior to the man who,
producing these goods for a market, could buy back the inferior
products of the packing house and the cannery. Does that exaggerate
the reality? On the contrary, it hardly does justice to it. Money
became the symbol of reputable consumption in every aspect of
living, from art and education to marriage and religion.

Max Weber pointed out the extraordinary departure of the new
doctrines of industrialism from the habits and customs of the greater
part of mankind under the more parsimonious system of production
that prevailed in the past. The aim of traditional industry was not
to increase the number of wants, but to satisfy the standards of a
particular class. Even today, among the poor, the habits of this
past linger on along with relics of magic and primitive medicine:
for an increase in wages, instead of being used to raise the worker’s
standard of expenditure, is sometimes used to secure respite from
work, or to provide the wherewithal for a spree which leaves the
worker in exactly the same physical and social state he was in before
beginning it. The notion of employing money to escape one’s class,
and of spending money conspicuously in order to register the fact
that one has escaped, did not come into existence in society at large
until a fairly late stage in the development of capitalism, although

392 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

it manifested itself in the upper ranks at the very beginning of the

modern regime.

The dogma of increasing wants, like so many other dogmas of
industrialism and democracy, first appeared in the counting house
and the court, and then filtered down into the rest of society. When
abstract counters in gold or paper became the symbols of power
and wealth, men began to value a form of commodity that had in
fact no natural limits. The absence of normal standards of acquisi-
tion first manifested itself among the successful bankers and mer-
chants; yet even here these standards lingered on far into the nine-
teenth century in the conception of retiring from business after
achieving a competence — ^that is, the standards of one’s class. The
absence of a customary norm of consumption was most conspicuous
in the extravagant life of the courts. To externalize the desire for
power, wealth, and privilege, the princes of the Renascence lavished
upon private luxury and display enormous amounts of money. They
themselves, unless they happened to rise from the merchant class,
did not earn this money: they were forced therefore to beg, borrow,
extort, steal, or pillage it; and truth to tell, they left none of these
possibilities unexplored. Once the machine began to increase the
money-making capacities of industry, these limits were extended
and the level of expenditure was raised for the entire society. This
phase of capitalism was accompanied, as I have already pointed out,
by a widespread breakdown of social institutions: hence the private
individual often sought to compensate by egocentric getting and
spending for the absence of collective institutions and a collective
aim. The wealth of nations was devoted to the private gratification
of individuals: the marvels of collective enterprise and cooperation
that the machine brought into play left the community itself im-
poverished.

Despite the natural egalitarian tendency of mass production, a
great gap continued to exist between the various economic classes:
this gap was glibly accounted for, in terms of Victorian economics,
by a differentiation between necessities, comforts, and luxuries. The
bare necessities were the lot of the piass of workers. The middle
classes, in addition to having their necessities satisfied on an ampler

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393

scale than the workers, were supported by comforts: while the rich
possessed in addition — and this made them more fortunate —
luxuries. Yet there was a contradiction. Under the doctrine of in-
creasing wants the mass of mankind was supposed to adopt for itself
the ultimate goal of a princely standard of expenditure. There existed
nothing less than a moral obligation to demand larger quantities and
more various kinds of goods — ^the only limit to this obligation being
the persistent unwillingness of the capitalist manufacturer to give
the worker a sufficient share of the industrial income to make an
effective demand. (At the height of the last wave of financial expan-
sion in the United States the capitalist sought to solve this paradox
by loaning money for increased consumption — installment purchase
— ^without raising wages, lowering prices, or decreasing his own ex-
cessive share in the national income: a device which would never
have occurred to the more sober Harpagons of the seventeenth
century.)

The historic mistakes of men are never so plausible and so dan-
gerous as when they are embodied in a formal doctrine, capable of
being expressed in a few catchwords. The dogma of increasing wants,
and the division of consumption into necessities, comforts, and
luxuries, and the description of the economic process as leading to
the universalizing of more expensive standards of consumption in
terms of machine-made goods — ^all these beliefs have been largely
taken for granted, even by many of those who have opposed the out-
right injustices and the more flagrant inequalities of the capitalist
economic system. The doctrine was put, with a classic fatuousness
and finality, by the Hoover Committee’s report on Recent Economic
Changes in the United States. “The survey has proved conclusively,”
says the report, “what has long been held theoretically to be true, that
wants are almost insatiable; that one want makes way for another.
The conclusion is that economically we have a boundless field before
us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer
wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

When one abandons class standards of consumption and examines
the facts themselves from the standpoint of the vital processes that

394 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

are to be served, one finds that there is not a single element in these
doctrines that can be retained.

First of all: vital wants are all necessarily limited. Just as the
organism itself does not continue to grow beyond the norm of its
species, a norm established within relatively narrow limits, so neither
can any particular function of life be satisfied by limitless indul-
gence. The body does not require more than a limited number of
calories of food per day. If it functions adequately on three meals a
day, it does not become three times as strong or effective on nine
meals: on the contrary, it is likely to suffer from indigestion and
constipation. If the intensity of amusement is tripled in a circus
by the use of three rings instead of one there are few other circum-
stances in which this rule holds: the value of various stimuli and
interests is not increased by quantitative multiplication, nor yet,
beyond a certain point, by endless variety. A variety of products
which perform similar functions is like omnivorousness in diet: a
useful factor of safety. But this does not alter the essential fact of
stability of desire and demand. A harem of a thousand wives may
satisfy the vanity of an oriental monarch; but what monarch is suf-
ficiently well endowed by nature to satisfy the harem?

Healthy activity requires restriction, monotony, repetition, as well
as change, variety, and expansion. The querulous boredom of a
child that possesses too many toys is endlessly repeated in the lives
of the rich who, having no pecuniary limit to the expression of their
desires, are unable without tremendous force of character to restrict
themselves to a single channel long enough to profit by its trenching
and deepening and wearing through. While the man of the twentieth
century has use for instruments, like the radio and the phonograph
and the telephone, which have no counterpart in other civilizations,
the number of such commodities is in itself limited. No one is better
off for having furniture that goes to pieces in a few years or, failing
that happy means of creating a fresh demand, “goes out of style.”
No one is better dressed for having clothes so shabbily woven that
they are worn out at the end of the season. On the contrary, such
rapid consumption is a tax on production; and it tends to wipe out
the gains the machine makes in that department. To the extent that

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395

people develop personal and esthetic interests, they are immune to
trivial changes in style and they disdain to foster such low demands.
Moreover, as Mr. J. A. Hobson has wisely pointed out, “if an undue
amount of individuality be devoted to the production and consump-
tion of food, clothing, etc., and the conscious, refined cultivation of
these tastes, higher forms of individual expression in work and life
will be neglected.”

The second characteristic of vital wants is that they cannot be
restricted to the bare elements of food enough to forestall starvation
and clothing and shelter enough to satisfy convention and to ward
off death by exposure. Life, from the very moment of birth on,
requires for its fulfillment goods and services that are usually
placed in the department of “luxuries.” Song, story, music, painting,
carving, idle play, drama — all these things lie outside the province
of animal necessities; but they are not things which are to be included
after the belly is satisfied : they are functions which must be included
in human existence even to satisfy the belly, to say nothing of the
emotional and intellectual and imaginative needs of man. To put
these functions at a distance, to make them the goal of an acquisitive
life, or to accept only so much of them as can be canalized into
machine goods and sold at a profit — to do this is to misinterpret
the nature of life as well as the possibilities of the machine.

The fact is that every vital standard has its own necessary luxuries;
and the wage that does not include them is not a living wage, nor is
the life made possible by bare subsistence a humane life. On the
other hand, to set as a goal for universal economic effort, or at least
to bait as a temptation, the imbecile standard of expenditure adopted
by the rich and the powerful is merely to dangle a wooden carrot
before the donkey; he cannot reach the carrot, and if he could, it
still would not nourish him. A high scale of expense has no essential
relation whatever to a high standard of living; and a plethora of
machine-made goods has no essential relation, either, since one of
the most essential elements of a good life — a pleasant and stimu-
lating natural environment, both cultivated and primitive — is not
a machine-made product. The notion that one implies the other is
a figment of the business man’s will-to-believe. As for what is called

396 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

comfort, a good part of it, freedom from exertion, the extensive use
of mechanical and personal service, leads in fact to an atrophy of
function: the ideal is at best a valetudinarian one. The reliance for
sensual pleasure upon inanimate objects — sofa pillows, upholstered
furniture, sweetmeats, and soft textiles — ^was one of those devices
whereby a bourgeois Puritanism, afiecting to renounce the flesh
and to castigate the body, merely acknowledged them in their most
decadent forms, transferring attention from the animate bodies of
men and women to objects that simulated them. The Renascence,
which celebrated a vigorous sensual life, scarcely produced a com-
fortable chair in two hundred years: but one has only to look at
the women painted by Veronese and Rubens to see how little such
inorganic upholstery was needed.

As mechanical methods have become more productive, the notion
has grown up that consumption should become more voracious. In
back of this lies an anxiety lest the productivity of the machine
create a glut in the market. The justification of labor-saving devices
was not that they actually saved labor but that they increased con-
sumption: whereas, plainly, labor-saving can take place only when
the standard of consumption remains relatively stable, so that in-
creases in conversion and in productive facility will he realized
in the form of actual increments of leisure. Unfortunately, the capi-
talistic industrial system thrives by a denial of this condition. It
thrives by stimulating wants rather than by limiting them and satis-
fying them. To acknowledge a goal of consummation would be to
place a brake upon production and to lessen the opportunities for
profit.

Technically speaking, changes in form and style are symptoms
of immaturity; they mark a period of transition. The error of capi-
talism as a creed lies in the attempt to make this period of transition
a permanent one. As soon as a contrivance reaches technical perfec-
tion, there is no excuse for replacement on the ground of increased
efficiency: hence the devices of competitive waste, of shoddy work-
manship, and of fashion must be resorted to. Wasteful consumption
and shoddy craftmanship go hand in hand: so that if we value sound-

ORIENTATION

397

ness and integrity and efficiency within the machine system^ we must
create a corresponding stability in consumption.

Speaking in the broadest terms this means that once the major
wants of mankind are satisfied by the machine process, our factory
system must be organized on a basis of regular annual replacement
instead of progressive expansion — ^not on a basis of premature re-
placement through debauched workmanship, adulterated, materials,
and grossly stimulated caprice. ^^The case,” as Mr. J. A. Hobson
again puts it, ^^is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our
material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the
limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilize
a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as
we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations
of matter which are due to human skill, which we call Art, we pass
outside the limit of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods
and acres and a law of diminishing returns.” In other words: a
genuine standard, once the vital physical wants are satisfied, tends
to change the plane of consumption and therefore to limit, in a
considerable degree, the extent of further mechanical enterprise.

But mark the vicious paradox of capitalist production. Although
the factory system has been based on the doctrine of expanding
wants and upon an expanding body of consumers, it has universally
fallen short of supplying the normal wants of mankind. Horrified at
the ^^utopian” notion of limited and normalized wants, and proudly
proclaiming on the contrary that wants are insatiable, capitalism has
not come within miles of satisfying the most modest standard of
normalized consumption. Capitalism, with respect to the working
mass of humanity, has been like a beggar that flaunts a hand covered
with jewels, one or two of them genuine, whilst it shivers in rags and
grabs at a crust of bread: the beggar may have money in the bank,
too, but that does not improve his condition. This has been brought
out clearly in every factual study that has been made of “advanced”
industrial communities, from Charles Booth’s classic survey of
London to the thoroughly documented Pittsburgh survey: it has been
re-enforced once more by Robert Lynd’s study of the fairly repre-
sentative community of “Middletown,” What does one find? While

398 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

the poorer inhabitants of Middletown often boast a motor car or a
radio set, the houses they lived in during their period of putative
prosperity often did not have even ordinary sanitary toilet facilities,
while the state of the house and the general environment was,
factually speaking, that of a slum.

When one says that the doctrine of increasing wants must be
thrown overboard and the standard of consumption normalized, one
does not in fact call for a contraction of our present industrial facil-
ities. In many departments, on the contrary, we are urgently in need
of an expansion of them. For the truth is that, despite all boasts of
progress and mechanical achievement, despite all fears of surpluses
and gluts, the mass of mankind, even in the countries that are tech-
nically the most advanced and financially the most prosperous, do
not have — and apart from the agricultural population never have
had — an adequate diet, proper facilities for hygiene, decent dwell-
ings, sufficient means and opportunities for education and recreation.
Indeed, in terms of vital norm a good part of these things have been
equally lacking in the spurious standard of expenditure secured by
the rich. In most great cities the urban dwellings of the upper classes,
for example, are lacking in sunlight and open spaces, and are almost
as inadequate as those of the very poor: so that, under a normalized
standard of life, they would in many cases be healthier and happier
than they are at present even though they would lack the illusion of
success and power and distinction.

To normalize consumption is to erect a standard that no single
class, whatever its expenditures, possesses today. But that standard
cannot be expressed in terms of any arbitrary sum of money — ^the
five thousand dollars per individual yearly suggested by Bellamy
in the eighties, or the twenty thousand dollars suggested by a recent
group of technocrats: for the point is that what five or twenty thou-
sand dollars could purchase today for any single individual would
not necessarily fulfill the more exacting vital requirements of this
standard. And indeed, the higher the vital standard, the less can it be
expressed adequately in terms of money: the more must it he ex-
pressed in terms of leisure, and health, and biological activity, and
esthetic pleasure, and the more, therefore, will it tend to be expressed

ORIENTATION

399

in terms of goods and environmental improvements that lie outside
of machine production.

At the same time, the conception of a normalized consumption
acknowledges the end of those princely capitalistic dreams of limit-
less incomes and privileges and sensuous vulgarities whose possession
by the masters of society furnished endless vicarious gratification to
their lackeys and imitators. Our goal is not increased consumption
but a vital standard: less in the preparatory means, more in the
ends, less in the mechanical apparatus, more in the organic fulfill-
ment. When we have such a norm, our success in life will not he
judged by the size of the rubbish heaps we have produced: it will
be judged by the immaterial and non-consumable goods we have
learned to enjoy, and by our biological fulfillment as lovers, mates,
parents and by our personal fulfillment as thinking, feeling men
and women. Distinction and individuality will reside in the per-
sonality, where it belongs, not in the size of the house we live in, in
the expense of our trappings, or in the amount of labor we can arbi-
trarily command. Handsome bodies, fine minds, plain living, high
thinking, keen perceptions, sensitive emotional responses, and a
group life keyed to make these things possible and to enhance
them — ^these are some of the objectives of a normalized standard.

While the animus that led to the expansion of the machine was
narrowly utilitarian, the net result of such an economy is to create an
antithetical stage, paralleled by the slave civilizations of old, en-
dowed with an abundance of leisure. This leisure, if not vilely
misused in the thoughtless production of more mechanical work,
either through misplaced ingenuity or a vain consumptive ritual,
may eventuate in a non-utilitarian form of society, dedicated more
fully to play and thought and social intercourse and all those ad-
ventures and pursuits that make life more significant. The maximum
of machinery and organization, the maximum of comforts and lux-
uries, the max i mum of consumption, do not necessarily mean a
maximum of life-eflSciency or life-expression. The mistake consists
in thinking that comfort, safety, absence of physical disease, a
plethora of goods are the greatest blessings of civilization, and in
believing that as they increase the evils of life will dissolve and

400 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

disappear. But comfort and safety are not unconditioned goods;
they are capable of defeating life just as thoroughly as hardship
and uncertainty; and the notion that every other interest, art, friend-
ship, love, parenthood, must be subordinated to the production of
increasing amounts of comforts and luxuries is merely one of the
superstitions of a money-bent utilitarian society.

By accepting this superstition the utilitarian has turned an ele-
mentary condition of existence, the necessity for providing a physical
basis for life, into an end. As a result, our machine-dominated society
is oriented solely to “things,” and its members have every hind
of possession except self-possession. No wonder that Thoreau ob-
served that its members, even in an early and relatively innocent state
of commerce and industry, led lives of quiet desperation. By putting
business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical
and financial leaders have neglected the chief business of life:
namely, growth, reproduction, development, expression. Paying in-
finite attention to the invention and perfection of incubators, they
have forgotten the egg, and its reason for existence.

7: Basic Communism

A normalized mode of consumption is the basis of a rationalized
mode of production. If one begins with production as an end in itself
there is nothing within the machine system or the price system to
guarantee a sufficient supply of vital goods. The capitalist economy
attempted to avoid the necessity for erecting a real standard of life
by relying upon the automatic operation of men’s private interests,
under the spell of the profit motive. All the necessary gains in produc-
tion, along with a cheapening of the objects sold, were supposed to be
an inevitable by-product of the business of buying cheap and selling
where the demand was strongest and the supply scantest. The en-
lightened self-interest of individual buyers was the guarantee that
the right things would be produced, in the right order, at the right
time.

Lacking any standard for distributing income except on the basis
of the gross labor performed and on the bare subsistence necessary
to enable the worker to return each day to his job, this system never

ORIENTATION

401

succeeded in its best days even on its own terms. The history of
capitalism is the history of quantity production, over-expansion,
greedy private over-capitalization on the basis of an increasing
prospective income, the private appropriation of profits and divi-
dends at the expense of the workers and the vast body of non-
capitalist ultimate consumers — all followed, again and again, by a
glut of unbought goods, a breakdown, bankruptcy, deflation, and
the bitter starvation and depression of the working classes whose
original inability to buy back the goods they had produced was
always the major factor in this debacle.

This system is necessarily unworkable upon its own premises
except perhaps under a pre-machine mode of production. For upon
capitalist terms, the price of any commodity, roughly speaking,
varies inversely as the quantity available at a given moment. This
means that as production approaches infinity, the price of a single
article must fall correspondingly toward zero. Up to a certain point,
the fall in prices expands the market: beyond that point, the increase
in real wealth for the community means a steady decrease in profits
per unit for the manufacturer. If the prices are kept up without an
expansion of real wages, an overplus occurs. If the price is lowered
far enough, the manufacturer cannot, no matter how great his turn-
over, produce a sufilcient margin of profit. Whereas mankind as a
whole gains in wealth to the extent that the necessaries of life can,
like the air, be had for the asking, the price system crashes into
disaster long before this ideal point has been reached. Thus the
gains in production under the price system must be diminished or
cancelled out, as Veblen mordantly pointed out, by deliberate
sabotage on the part of the financier and the business man. But this
strategy has only a temporary effect: for the burden of debt, espe-
cially when recapitalized on the basis of a prospective expansion
of the population and the market, ultimately outruns the curtailed
productive capacities and subjects them to a load they cannot meet.

Now, the chief meaning of power conversion and mechanized pro-
duction lies in the fact that they have created an economy of surplus
— ^which is to say, an economy not adapted to the price system. As
more and more work is transferred to automatic machines, the

402 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

process of displacing workers from industry imder this system is
the equivalent of disfranchising them as consumers, since, unlike
the holders of stock, bonds, and mortgages, they have no claim upon
industry under capitalist conventions other than that resulting from
their labor. It is useless to talk about temporary absorptions of labor
by this or that industry: part of this absorption by the industries
concerned with distribution only increases the overhead and the
waste. And apart from this, under the system itself labor has lost
both its bargaining power and its capacity to obtain subsistence: the
existence of substitute industries sometimes postpones the individual
but does not avert the collective day of reckoning. Lacking the power
to buy the necessaries of life for themselves, the plight of the dis-
placed workers reacts upon those who remain at work: presently the
whole structure collapses, and even financiers and enterprisers and
managers are sucked into the whirlpool tiheir own cupidity, short-
sightedness and folly have created. All this is a commonplace: but it
rises, not as a result of some obscure uncontrollable law, like the
existence of spots on the sun, but as the outcome of our failure to
take advantage by adequate social provision of the new processes of
mechanized production.

The problem presses for solution: but in one sense it has already
been solved. For the better part of a thousand years, widows, orphans,
and prudent sedentary people have been living at ease, buying
food, drink, and shelter, without performing any work for the com-
munity. Their shares and their insurance payments constitute a
first claim upon industry; and as long as there is any production
of goods at all, and as long as the present legal conventions are main-
tained, they are sure of their means of existence. No capitalist talks
about this system as one that demoralizes or undermines the self-
respect of those who are so supported: indeed, the small incomes
of the rentier classes have been an obvious help in the arts and
sciences to their recipients: a Milton, a Shelley, a Darwin, a Ruskin
existed by such grace; and one might even show, perhaps, that they
had been more beneficial to society at large than the swollen fortunes
of the more active capitalists. On the other hand, the small fixed
income, though it sets at a distance the worst torments of economic

ORIENTATION

403

distress, does not completely meet every economic requirement: so,
in the case of the young and the ambitious, there is an incentive to
productive and professional enterprise, even though the sting of
starvation be absent.

The extension of this system to the community as a whole is
what I mean by basic communism. In recent times, it was first seri-
ously proposed by Edward Bellamy, in a somewhat arbitrary form,
in his utopia. Looking Backward; and it has become plain during the
last fifty years that an efficient mechanized system of production can
be made serviceable to humanity at large in no other fashion. To
make the worker’s share in production the sole basis for his claim
to a livelihood — as was done even by Marx in the labor theory of
value he took over from Adam Smith — is, as power-production ap-
proaches perfection, to cut the ground from under his feet. In actu-
ality, the claim to a livelihood rests upon the fact that, like the child
in a family, one is a member of a community: the energy, the tech-
nical knowledge, the social heritage of a community belongs equally
to every member of it, since in the large the individual contributions
and differences are completely insignificant.

l^Ihe classic name for such a universal system of distributing the
essential means of life — as described by Plato and More long before
Owen and Marx — is communism, and I have retained it here. But
let me emphasize that this communism is necessarily post-Marxian,
for the facts and values upon which it is based are no longer the
paleotechnic ones upon which Marx founded his policies and pro-
grams. Hence communism, as used here, does not imply the partic-
ular nineteenth century ideology, the messianic absolutism, and the
narrowly militarist tactics to which the official communist parties
usually cling, nor does it imply a slavish imitation of the political
methods and social institutions of Soviet Russia, however admirable
soviet courage and discipline may he.]

Differentiation and preference and special incentive should be
taken into account in production and consumption only after the
security and continuity of life itself is assured. Here and there we
have established the beginnings of a basic communism in the pro-
vision of water and education and books. There is no rational

404 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

reason for stopping short any point this side of a normal stand-
ard of consumption. Such a basis has no relation to individual
capacities and virtues: a family of six requires roughly three times
as much goods as a family of two, although there may be but
one wage-earner in the first group and two in the second. We give at
least a minimum of food and shelter and medical attention to crim-
inals who have presumably behaved against the interests of society:
why then should we deny it to the lazy and the stubborn? To assume
that die great mass of mankind would belong to the latter category
is to forget the positive pleasures of a fuller and richer life.

Moreover, under a scientific economy, the amount of grain, fruit,
meat, milk, textiles, metals and raw materials, like the number of
houses needed annually for replacement and for the increase of popu-
lation, can be calculated in the gross in advance of production. It
needs only the insurance of consumption to make the tables of produc-
tion progressively more accurate. Once the standard was established,
gains beyond those calculated would be bonuses for the whole com-
munity: such gains, instead of stopping the works, as they do now,
would lubricate them, and so far from throwing the mechanism out
of gear they would lighten the load for the whole community and
increase the margin of time or energy available for the modes of life,
rather than for the means.

To speak of a “planned economy,’’ without such a basic standard
of consumption and without the political means of making it prevail,
is to mistake the monopolistic sabotage of large-scale capitalist in-
dustry for intelligent social control.

The foundations of this system of distribution already, I repeat,
exist. Schools, libraries, hospitals, universities, museums, baths, lodg-
ing houses, gymnasia, are supported in every large center at the ex-
pense of the community as a whole. The police and the fire services,
similarly, are provided on the basis of need instead of on the ability
to pay: roads, canals, bridges, parks, playgrounds, and even — in
Amsterdam — ferry services are similarly communized. Furthermore,
in the most jejune and grudging form, a basic communism is in exist-
ence in countries that have unemployment and old-age insurance. But
the latter measures are treated as means of salvage, rather than as a

ORIENTATION

405

salutary positive mechanism for rationalizing the production and
normalizing the consumptive standards of the whole community.

A basic communism, which implies the obligation to share in the
work of the community up to the amount required to furnish the
basis, does not mean the complete enclosure of every process and
the complete satisfaction of every want in the system of planned pro-
duction. Careful engineers have figured that the entire amount of
work of the existing community could be carried on with less than
twenty hours work per week for every existing worker: with complete
rationalization all along the line, and with the elimination of dupli-
cations and parasitisms, probably less than twenty hours would suffice
to produce a far greater quantity of goods than is produced at present.
As it is, some 15 million industrial workers supply the needs of 120
million inhabitants of the United States. Limiting rationed produc-
tion and communized consumption to basic requirements, the amount
of compulsory labor would be even less. Under such provisions,
technological unemployment would be a boon.

Basic communism would apply to the calculable economic needs
of the community. It would touch those goods and services which
can be standardized, weighed, measured, or about which a statistical
computation can be made. Above such a standard the desire for
leisure would compete with the desire for more goods: and here
fashion, caprice, irrational choice, invention, special aims, would
still perhaps have a part to play: for although all these elements
have been grossly over-stimulated by capitalism, a residue of them
would remain and would have to be provided for in any conceivable
economic system. But under a basic communism, these special wants
would not operate so as to disorganize production and paralyze dis-
tribution. With regard to the basic commodities there would be com-
plete equality of income: and as consumption became normalized,
the basic processes would care, in all probability, for a larger and
larger part of the community’s needs. On this basis — and so far as
I can see on no other basis — can our gains in production and our
growing displacement of human labor be realized in benefits for
society at large. The alternative to basic communism is the toleration
of chaos: either the closing down periodically of the productive plant

406 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

and the destruction — quaintly called valorization — of essential goods,
with shifty efforts at imperialist conquest to force open foreign
markets; either that or a complete retreat from the machine into a
sub-agriculture (subsistence farming) and a sub-industry (subsistence
manufacture) which would be far lower in every way than what
handicraft industry had provided in the eighteenth century. If we
wish to retain the benefits of the machine, we can no longer afford to
deny its chief social implication : namely, basic communism.

Not the least advantage of basic communism would be the fact
that it would tend to put a brake upon industrial enterprise. But such
a brake, instead of being in the form of capitalist sabotage, or in the
shocking dislocation of a commercial crisis, would be a gradual les-
sening of the speed of individual parts and a gearing of the whole
organization into a steady routine of productivity. Mr. J. A. Hobson
has again put this matter with his usual insight and wisdom: “Indus-
trial progress,” he says, “would undoubtedly be slower under State-
control, because the very object of such control is to divert a larger
proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations [pre-
paratory production] to apply them in producing higher forms of
wealth. It is not, however, right to assume that progress in the indus-
trial arts would cease under state-industry: such progress would he
slower, and would itself partake of a routine character — a slow,
continuous adjustment of the mechanism of production and distribu-
tion to the slowly changing needs of the community.” However for-
bidding such a prospect looks to the enterpriser of the old order,
humanly speaking it would represent a tremendous gain.

8: Socialize Creation!

During a great part of the history of mankind, from neolithic times
onward, the highest achievements of the race in art and philosophy
and literature and technics and science and religion were in the pos-
session of a small caste of people. The technical means of multiply-
ing these achievements were so cumbrous — ^the hieroglyphics of the
Egyptians, the haked slabs of the Babylonian texts, even the hand-
written letters on the papyrus or parchment of a later period — ^that
the mastery of the implements of thought and expression was the

ORIENTATION

407

work of the better part of a lifetime. Those who had manual tasks
to perform were automatically excluded from most of the avenues of
creation outside their tasks, though they might eventually share in the
product created, at second or third hand. The life of the potter or
the smith, as Jesus ben Sirach pointed out with priggish but realistic
self-justification, rmfitted him for the offices of the creative life.

This caste-monopoly was seriously disrupted during the Middle
Ages, partly because Christianity itself was in origin the religion of
the lowly and the downtrodden. Not merely was every human creature
a worthy subject of salvation, but within the monastery and the church
and the university there was a steady recruitment of novices and
students from every rank in society; and the powerful Benedictine
order, hy making manual work itself one of the obligations of a dis-
ciplined life, broke down an ancient and crippling prejudice against
participation and experiment, as complementary to observation and
contemplation, in creative activity. Within the craft guilds the same
process took place in reverse direction: not merely did the journey-
man, in qualifying for his craft, get an opportunity to view critically
the arts and achievements of other cities, not merely was he en-
couraged to rise from the menial and mechanical operations of his
craft to such esthetic mastery as it offered, but in the performance
of the mysteries and the moralities the worker participated in the
esthetic and religious life of the whole community. Indeed the writer,
like Dante, could have a political status in this society only as the
member of a working guild.

The humanist movement, hy placing an emphasis upon textual
scholarship and the dead languages to which this scholarship applied,
re-enforced the widened separation of classes under capitalism.
Unable to obtain the necessary preparatory training, the worker was
excluded from the higher culture of Europe: even the highest type
of eotechnic worker, the artist, and even one of the proudest figures
among these artists, Leonardo, felt obliged in his private notes to
defend himself against the assumption of the merely literate that
his interests in painting and science were somehow inferior.

Indifferent to the essential life of men as workers, this culture de-
veloped primarily as an instrument of caste-power, and only in a

408 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

feeble and secondary way for the benefit of mankind as a whole.
From one end to the other some of the very best minds of the last
three centuries, in the midst of their most vigorous creative efforts,
have been apologizing for the injustices and perversions of their
masters. Thorndike in his History of Science and Medicine in the
Fifteenth Century notes the degradation that overcame thought when
the free cities that Petrarch had known in his youth were enslaved
by conquering armies: but the same fact is equally plain in Macchia-
velli, Hobbes, Leibniz, Hegel; and this tendency of thought reached
a certain climax in the misapplication of the Malthus-Darwin theory
of the struggle for existence, to justify warfare, the nordic race, and
the dominant position of the bourgeoisie.

But while the humanist side of this new culture was fostered on
individualistic and caste lines, with a marked bias in favor of the
possessing classes, science worked in an opposite direction. The very
growth of scientific knowledge made it impossible to confine it, as a
secret, to a small group, as astronomy was maintained in earlier civi-
lizations. Not merely this, but science, by systematically utilizing the
practical knowledge of artists and physicians in anatomy, of miners
and metallurgists in chemistry, kept in touch with the working life of
the community: was it not the predicament of vintners, brewers, and
silkworm growers that roused Pasteur to his productive researches
in bacteriology? Even when science was remote and by nature eso-
teric, it was not snobbish. Socialized in method, international in scope,
impersonal in animus, performing some of its most hazardous and
fruitful feats of thought by reason of its very divorce from immedi-
ate responsibility, the sciences have been slowly building up a grand
cosmogony in which only one element is still lacking — ^the inclusion
of the spectator and experimenter in the final picture.

Unfortunately, the dulling and depressing of the mind that in-
evitably followed from the division of labor and the bare routine of
factory life, have opened an unnatural breach between science and
technics and common practice and all the arts that lie outside the ma-
chine system. The workers themselves were thrown back upon the
rubbish of earlier cultures, lingering in tradition and memory, and
they clung to superstitious forms' of religion which kept them in a

ORIENTATION

409

State of emotional tutelage to the very forces that were exploiting
them, or else they forfeited altogether the powerful emotional and
moral stimulus that a genuine religion contributes to life. This applies
likewise to the arts. The peasant and handworker of the Middle Age
was the equal of the artists who carved and painted in his churches
and his public halls: the highest art of that time was not too high
for the common people, nor was there, apart from the affectations of
court poesy, one kind of art for the few and another kind for the
many. There were high and low levels in all this art: but the division
was not marked by status or pecuniary condition.

During the last few centuries, however, popular means “vul-
gar” and “vulgar” means not simply the broadly human, but some-
thing inferior and crass and a little dehumanized. In short, instead
of socializing the creative activities of society, we have socialized on
a great scale only the low counterfeits of those activities: counter-
feits that limit and stultify the mind. A Millet, a van Gogh, a Dau-
mier, a Whitman, a Tolstoy naturally seek the working class for com-
panionship: but they were actually kept alive and rewarded and ap-
preciated chiefly by the very bourgeoisie whose manners they loathed
and whose patronage they wished to escape. On the other hand, the
experience of New England and New York between 1830 and 1860,
when there was still to the westward a great sweep of unappropriated
land, shows how fruitful an essentially classless society can be when
it is nourished by the very occupations that a caste-culture disdains.
It is no accident that the epic of Moby Dick was written by a common
sailor, that Walden was written by a pencil-maker and surveyor,
and that Leaves of Grass was written by a printer and carpenter.
Only when it is possible to move freely from one aspect of experience
and thought and action to another can the mind follow its complete
trajectory. Division of labor and specialization, specialization be-
tween occupations, specialization in thought, can be justified only as
temporary expedients: beyond that, as Kropotkin pointed out, lies the
necessity of integrating labor and restoring its unity with life.

What we need, then, is the realization that the creative life, in all
its manifestations, is necessarily a social product. It grows with the
aid of traditions and techniques maintained and transmitted by society

410 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

at large, and neither tradition nor product can remain the sole pos-
session of the scientist or the artist or the philosopher, still less of
the privileged groups that, under capitalist conventions, so largely
support them. The addition to this heritage made by any individual,
or even by any generation, is so small in comparison 'with the accu-
mulated resources of the past that the great creative artists, like
Goethe, are duly humble about their personal importance. To treat
such activity as egoistic enjoyment or as property is merely to brand
it as trivial: for the fact is that creative activity is finally the only
important business of mankind, the chief justification and the most
durable fruit of its sojourn on the planet. The essential task of all
sound economic activity is to produce a state in which creation will
be a common fact in all experience: in which no group will be denied,
by reason of toil or deficient education, their share in the cultural
life of the community, up to the limits of their personal capacity.
Unless we socialize creation, unless we make production subservient
to education, a mechanized system of production, however efiicient,
will only harden into a servile byzantine formality, enriched by
bread and circuses.

9: Work for Automaton and Amateur

Not work, not production for its own sake or for the sake of ul-
terior profit, but production for the sake of life and work as the
normal expression of a disciplined life, are the marks of a rational
economic society. Such a society brings into existence choices and pos-
sibilities that scarcely existed so long as work was considered ex-
traneous, and profit — or terror of starvation — ^was the chief impetus
to labor.

The tendency of mechanization, from the seventeenth century on,
has been to standardize the processes of work and to make them capa-
ble of machine operation. In power plants with automatic stokers, in
advanced textile mills, in stamping factories, in various chemical
works, the worker has scarcely any direct part in the process of pro-
duction: he is, so to say, a machine-herd, attending to the welfare of
a flock of machines which do the actual work: at best, he feeds them,
oils them, mends them when they break down, while the work itself

ORIENTATION

411

is as remote from his province as is the digestion which fattens the
sheep looked after hy the shepherd.

Such machine-tending often calls for alertness, non-repetitious
movement, and general intelligence: in discussing neotechnics I
pointed out that in industries that have advanced to this level the
worker has recovered some of the freedom and self-direction that
were frustrated in the more incomplete mechanical processes where
the worker, instead of being general mechanic and overseer, is merely
a substitute for the hand or eye that the machine has not yet de-
veloped. But in other processes, such as the straight line assemblage
of the motor factory, for example, the individual worker is part of
the process itself, and only a small fraction of him is engaged. Such
labor is necessarily servile in character, and no amount of apology
or psychological rationalization can make it otherwise: nor can the
social necessity for the product mollify the process itself.

Our disregard for the quality of work itself, for work as a vital
and educational process, is so habitual that it scarcely ever enters
into our social demands. Yet it is plain that in the decision as to
whether to build a bridge or a tunnel there is a human question that
should outweigh the question of cheapness or mechanical feasability:
namely, the number of lives that will be lost in the actual building or
the advisability of condemning a certain number of men to spend
their entire working days undergroimd supervising tunnel traffic. As
soon as our thought ceases to be automatically conditioned hy the
mine, such questions become important. Similarly the social choice
between silk and rayon is not one that can be made simply on the
different costs of production, or the difference in quality between
the fibres themselves: there also remains, to be integrated in the de-
cision, the question as to difference in working-pleasure between
tending silkworms and assisting in rayon production. What the prod-
uct contributes to the laborer is just as important as what the worker
contributes to the product. A well-managed society might alter the
process of motor car assemblage, at some loss of speed and cheap-
ness, in order to produce a more interesting routine for the worker:
similarly, it would either go to the expense of equipping dry-process
cement making plants with dust removers — or replace the product

412 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

itself with a less noxious substitute. When none of these alternatives
was available, it would drastically reduce the demand itself to the
lowest possible level.

Now, taken as a whole, including the preparatory processes of
scientific investigation and mechanical design, to say nothing of the
underlying political organization, industry is potentially a valuable
instrument of education. This point, originally stressed by Karl Marx,
was well pat by Helen Marot when she said: “Industry offers oppor-
tunities for creative experience which is social in its processes as
well as in its destination. The imaginative end of production does
not terminate with the possession of an article; it does not center in
the product or in the skill of this or that man, but in the development
of commerce and technological processes and the evolution of world
acquaintanceship and understanding. Modern machinery, the division
of labor, the banking system, methods of communication, make pos-
sible real association. But they are real and possible only as the
processes are open for the common participation, understanding, and
judgment of those engaged in industrial enterprise; they are real
and possible as the animus of industry changes from exploitation to
a common and associated desire to create; they are real and possible
as the individual character of industry gives way before the evolu-
tion of social effort.”

Once the objective of industry is diverted from profit-making, pri-
vate aggrandizement, crude exploitation, the unavoidable monotonies
and restrictions will take a subordinate place, for the reason that the
process will be humanized as a whole. This means that compensations
for the repressive elements in the industrial routine will take place
by adjustments within industry itself, instead of being permitted to
heap up there, and to explode disastrously and anti-socially in other
parts of society. To fancy that such a non-profit system is an impossi-
bility is to forget that for thousands of years the mass of mankind
knew no other system. The new economy of needs, replacing the
capitalist economy of acquisition, will put the limited corporations
and communities of the old economy on a broader and more in-
telligently socialized basis: but at bottom it will draw upon and
canalize similar impulses. Despite all its chequered features and in-

ORIENTATION

413

ternal contradictions, this is to date perhaps the chief promise held
out by Soviet Russia.

To the extent that industry must still employ human beings as
machines, the hours of work must be reduced. We must determine the
number of hours of blank routine per week that is within the limits
of human tolerance, beyond which obvious deterioration of mind and
spirit sets in. The very fact that purely repetitious work, without
choices or variations, seems to agree with morons is enough to warn
us of its dangers in relation to human beings of higher grade. But
there remain occupations, machine-crafts as well as hand-crafts,
which are interesting and absorbing in their own right, provided that
they are not regimented too strictly in the interests of superficial
efiiciency. In the act of rationalizing and standardizing the methods
of production, human engineering will have to weigh the social bene-
fits of increased production with automatic machinery, with a les-
sened participation and satisfaction upon the part of the worker,
against a lower level of production, with a larger opportunity for the
worker. It is a shallow technicism to enforce the cheaper product at
any price. Where the product is socially valuable and where the
worker himself can be completely eliminated the answer will often,
perhaps, favor automatism: but short of this state the decision can-
not be lightly made. For no gain in production will justify the elimi-
nation of a humane species of work, unless other compensations in
the way of work itself are at the same time provided. Money, goods,
vacant leisure, cannot possibly make up for the loss of a life-work;
although it is plain that money and goods, imder our present abstract
standards of success, are called upon often to do precisely this.

When we begin to rationalize industry organically, that is to say,
with reference to the entire social situation, and with reference to
the worker himself in all his biological capacities — ^not merely with
reference to the crude labor product and an extraneous ideal of
mechanical efiiciency — ^the worker and his education and his en-
vironment become quite as important as the commodity he produces.
We already acknowledge this principle on the negative side when we
prohibit cheap lead glazes in pottery manufacture because the
worker’s health is undermined by their use: but it has a positive ap-

414 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

plication as well. Not merely should we prohibit work that is bad
for the health: we should promote work that is good for the health.
It is on these groimds that agriculture and our rural regions may
presently get back part of the population that was originally sucked
into the villes tentaculaires by the machine.

Labor itself, from spading a garden to mapping the stars, is one
of the permanent joys of life. A machine economy that permitted
mankind the inane and trivial leisure Mr. H. G. Wells once depicted
in The Time Machine, and that most city dwellers are condemned to
under capitalist society, particularly during periods of unemploy-
ment, would scarcely be worth the effort necessary to lubricate it:
such vacuity, such boredom, such debilitating lack of function do
not represent a gain of any kind. The chief benefit the rational use
of the machine promises is certainly not the elimination of work:
what it promises is something quite different — ^the elimination of
servile work or slavery: those types of work that deform the body,
cramp the mind, deaden the spirit. The exploitation of machines is
the alternative to that exploitation of degraded men that was prac-
ticed throughout antiquity and that was challenged on a large scale,
for the first time, in the power economy evolved in the eotechnic
phase.

By the completion of our machine organization, we can recover
for work the inherent values which it was robbed of by the pecuniary
aims and class animosities of capitalist production. The worker,
properly extruded from mechanical production as slave, comes back
as director: if his instincts of workmanship are still unsatisfied by
these managerial tasks, he has by reason of the power and leisure
he now potentially commands a new status within production as an
amateur. The gain in freedom here is a direct compensation for the
pressure and duress, for the impersonality, the anonymity, the col-
lective unity of machine production.

Beyond the basic needs of production, beyond a normalized — and
therefore moralized — standard of life, beyond the essential com-
munism in consumption I have posited, there lie wants which the
individual or the group has no right to demand from society at large,
and which, in turn, society has no need to curtail or arbitrarily re-

ORIENTATION 415

press in the individual, so long as the motive of exploitation is re-
moved. These wants may he satisfied by direct effort. To weave or
knit clothes by hand, to produce a necessary piece of furniture, to
experimentally build an airplane on lines that have not won official
approval — ^these are samples of occupations open to the individual,
the household, the small working group, apart from the regular chan-
nels of production. Similarly, while the great staples in agriculture,
like wheat, com, hogs, beef, will possibly tend to be the work of large
cooperatives, green vegetables and flowers may be raised by indi-
viduals on a scale impossible so long as land was privately appro-
priated and the mass of industrial mankind was packed together in
solid areas of house and pavement.

As our basic production becomes more impersonal and routinized,
our subsidiary production may well become more personal, more
experimental, and more individualized. This could not happen under
the older regime of handicraft: it was a development not possible
before the neotechnic improvements of the machine with electricity
as a source of power. For the acquisition of skill necessary for efficient
production on a handicraft basis was a tedious process, and the slow
tempo of handicraft in the essential occupations did not give a suffi-
cient margin of time for achievement along other lines. Or rather, the
margin was achieved by the subordination of the working class and
the elevation of a small leisure class: the worker and the amateur
represented two different strata. With electric power a small ma-
chine shop may have all the essential devices and machine tools —
apart from specialized automatic machines — ^that only a large plant
could have afforded a century ago: so the worker can regain, even
within the machine occupations, most of the pleasure that the machine
itself, by its increasing automatism, has been taking away from him.
Such workshops connected with schools should be part of the public
equipment of every community.

The work of the amateur, then, is a necessary corrective to the im-
personality, the standardization, the wholesale methods and products
of automatic production. But it is likewise an indispensable educa-
tional preparation for the machine process itself. All the great ad-
vances in machines have been on the basis of the handicraft opera-

416

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

tions or scientific thought — itself aided and corrected by small-scale
Tnanna] operations called experiments. As “technological tenuous-
ness” increases, the diffusion of handicraft knowledge and skill as a
mode of education is necessary, both as a safety device and as a
means to further insight, discovery, and invention. For the machine
cannot know more or do more than the human eye or hand or mind
that designs or operates it. Given knowledge of the essential oper-
ations, one could reconstruct every machine in the world. But let that
knowledge be cut off for so much as a single generation, and all the
complicated derivatives would be so much junk. If parts broke and
rusted without being immediately replaced, the whole fabric would
be in ruins. And there is still a further reason to give an important
position to the hand-crafts and machine-crafts, as subsidiary forms of
production, run on a domestic scale. For both safety and flexibility in
all forms of industrial production it is important that we learn to
travel light. Our specialized automatic machines, precisely because of
their high degree of specialization, lack adaptability to new forms of
production; a change in demand, a change in pattern, leads to the
wholesale scrapping of very expensive equipment. Wherever demand
for products is of an uncertain or variable nature, it is an economy
in the long run to use non-specialized machines; this decreases the
burden of wasted effort and idle machinery. What is true of the ma-
chine is equally true of the worker; instead of a high degree of spe-
cialized skill, an all-round competence is better preparation for
breaking through stale routines and for facing emergencies.

It is the basic skills, the basic manual operations, the basic dis-
coveries, the basic formulas which must be transmitted from genera-
tion to generation. To maintain the superstructure whilst we let the
foundations moulder away is to endanger not alone the existence of
our complicated civilization but its further development and refine-
ment. For critical changes and adaptations in machines, as in organ-
isms, come not from the differentiated and specialized stock, but
from the relatively undifferentiated common ancestor; it was the
foot-treadle that served Watt’s need for transmitting power in a steam
engine. Automatic machines may conquer an ever-larger province in
basic production; but it must be balanced by the hand-crafts and the

ORIENTATION 417

machine-crafts for education, recreation, and experiment. Without
the second, automatism would ultimately he a blight on society, and
its further existence would be imperilled.

10: Political Control

Plan and order are latent in all modern industrial processes, in
the working drawing, in the preliminary calculations, in the organi-
zation chart, in the time-schedule, in the graphs that keep track of
production day by day, and even hour by hour, as in a power plant.
This graphic and ordered procedure, originating in the separate
techniques of the civil engineer, the architect, the mechanical engi-
neer, the forester, and other types of technician, is particularly evi-
dent in the neotechnic industries. (See, for example, the elaborate
economic and social surveys of the Bell Telephone Company, in
preparation for establishing or extending services.) What is still
lacking is the transference of these techniques from industry to the
social order at large. The order so far established is too local to be
socially effective on a great scale, and apart from Soviet Russia the
social apparatus is either antiquated, as in the “democratic” coun-
tries, or renovated in archaic forms, as in the even more backward
Fascist countries. In short, our political organization is either paleo-
technic or pre-technic. Hence the hiatus between the mechanical
achievements and the social results. We have now to work out the
details of a new political and social order, radically different by
reason of the knowledge that is already at our command from any
that now exists. And to the extent that this order is the product of
scientific thought and humanistic imagination, it wiU leave a place
for irrational and instinctive and traditional elements in society
which were flouted, to their own ultimate peril, by the narrow forms
of rationalism that prevailed during the past century.

The transformation of the worker’s status in industry can come
about only through a three-fold system of control: the functional
political organization of industry from within, the organization of
the consumers as active and self-regulating groups, giving rational
expression to collective demands, and the organization of industries
as units within the political framework of cooperating states.

418 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

The internal organization implies the transformation of the trade
union from a bargaining organization, seeking special privileges
apart from the industry or the working class as a whole, into a pro-
ducing organization, concerned with establishing a standard of pro-
duction, a humane system of management, and a collective discipline
which will include every member, from such unskilled workers who
may enter as apprentices up to the administrators and engineers. In
the nineteenth century the mass of workers, cowed, uneducated, un-
skilled in cooperation, were only too willing to permit the capitalists
to retain the responsibilities for financial management and produc-
tion: their unions sought for the most part merely to obtain for the
worker a greater share of the income, and somewhat more favorable
conditions of labor.

The enterpriser, in turn, looked upon the management of his indus-
try as a god-given right of ownership: to hire and fire, to stop and
start, to build and destroy were special rights which neither the
worker nor the government could encroach upon. The development
of laws restricting the hours of labor and establishing minimum
sanitary conditions, the development of public control bf important
public utilities, the growth of cartels and semi-monopolistic trade
organizations under government supervision, have broken down this
self-sufficiency of the manufacturer. But these measures, though
struggled for by the worker, have done little to increase his dynamic
participation in the management of industry itself. While here and
there moves have been made toward a more positive integration of
labor, as in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad machine shops and in
certain sections of the Garment Industry in America, for the most part
the worker has no responsibility beyond his detailed job.

Until the worker emerges from a state of spiritless dependence
there can be no large gain either in collective efficiency or in social
direction: by its nature autonomy is something that cannot be handed
from above. For the functional organization of industry there must
be collective discipline, collective efficiency, above all collective re-
sponsibility: along with this must go a deliberate effort to produce
engineering and scientific and managerial talent from within the ranks
of the workers themselves, in addition to enlisting the services of

419

ORIENTATION

more socialized members of this group, who are already spiritually
developed beyond the lures and opportunities of the financial system
to which they are attached. Without growth within the factory of effec-
tive units for work, the position of the worker, no matter what the
ostensible nature of the political system, must remain a precarious
and servile one; for the increase of mechanization vitiates his bar-
gaining power, the increasing ranks of the unemployed tend auto-
matically to beat down his wages, and the periodical disorganization
of industry cancels out any small gains he may momentarily make.
Plainly, such control, such autonomy, will not be achieved without
a struggle — internal struggle for training and knowledge, and an ex-
ternal struggle against the weapons and the instruments handed down
from the past. In the long run this struggle involves a fight not only
against a sessile administrative bureaucracy witliin the trade unions
themselves; more importantly, it involves an outright battle with the
guardians of capitalism. Fortunately, the moral bankruptcy of the
capitalist system is an opportunity as well as an obstacle: a decayed
institution, though more dangerous to live with than a sound one, is
easier to remove. The victory over the possessing classes is not the
goal of this struggle: that is but a necessary incident in the effort to
achieve a solidly integrated and socialized basis for industry. The
struggle for power is a futile one, no matter who is victorious, unless
it is directed by the will-to-f unction. Fascism has effaced the workers’
attempts to overwhelm the capitalist system in Italy and Germany be-
cause ultimately the workers had no plan for carrying the fight be-
yond the stage of fighting.

The point to remember, however, is that the power needed to
operate and to transform our modern technics is something other
than physical force. The whole organization of modern industry is
a complicated one, dependent upon a host of professionalized skills
that link into each other, dependent likewise upon the faith and good
will of those interchanging services, data, and calculations. Unless
there is an inner coherence here, no amount of supervision will en-
sure against knavery and non-cooperation. This society cannot be
run by brute force or by servile truculent skill backed by brute force:
in the long run such habits of action are self-defeating. The principle

420

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

of functional autonomy and functional responsibility must be ob-
served at every stage of the process, and the contrary principle of
class domination, based upon a privileged status — ^whether that class
be aristocratic or proletarian — is technically and socially inefficient.
Moreover, technics and science demand autonomy and self-control,
that is, freedom, in the realm of thought. The attempt to limit this
functional autonomy by the erection of special dogmas, as the
Christians limited it in the early days of Christianity, will cause a
fall into cruder methods of thinking, inimical to the essential basis
of both technics and modern civilization.

As industry advances in mechanization, a greater weight of politi-
cal power must develop outside it than was necessary in the past. To
counterbalance the remote control and the tendency to continue along
the established grooves of industrial effort there must arise a col-
lective organization of consumers for the sake of controlling the
kind and quantity and distribution of the product itself. In addition
to the negative check to which all industry is subject, the struggle for
existence between competing commodities, there must be a positive
mode of regulation which will ensure the production of desirable
types of commodities. Without such organization even our semi-com-
petitive commercial regime is slow in adapting itself to demand: at
the very moment that it changes, from month to month and year to
year, the superficial styles of its products, it resists the introduction
of fresh ideas, as the American furniture industry for long and stub-
bornly resisted the introduction of non-period furniture. Under a
more stable noncompetitive organization of industry, consumers’
groups for formulating and imposing demands will be even more
important for rational production: without such groups any central
agency for determining lines of production and quotas must neces-
sarily be arbitrary and inefficient. Meanwhile the erection of scien-
tific scales of performance and material quality — so that goods will
be sold on the basis of actual value and service, rather than on the
basis of clever packaging and astute advertising — is a natural corol-
lary on the consumer’s side to the rationalization of industry. The
failure to use the existing laboratories for determining such stand-
ards — ^like the National Bureau of Standards in the United States — '

ORIENTATION

421

for tlie benefit of the entire body of consumers is one of the most
impudent miscarriages of knowledge under the capitalist system.

The third necessary element of political control lies in the posses-
sion of land, capital, credit, and machines. In America, which has
reached an advanced stage of both mechanical improvement and
financial organization, almost fifty per cent of the capital invested in
industry, and something over forty per cent of the income of the
nation, is concentrated in two hundred corporations. These corpora-
tions are so huge and have their capital in so many shares, that in no
one of them does any particular person control by ownership more
than five per cent of the capital invested. In other words, adminis-
tration and ownership, which had a natural affiliation in small-scale
enterprise, are now almost completely divorced in the major indus-
tries. (This condition was astutely used during the last two decades,
by the bankers and administrators of American industry, for exam-
ple, to appropriate for their private advantage a lion’s share of the
income, by a process of systematic pillage through recapitalization
and bonuses.) Since the present shareholders of industry have al-
ready been dispossessed by the machinations of capitalism itself,
there would be no serious jar if the system were put on a rational
basis, by placing the banking functions directly under the state, and
collecting capital directly out of the earnings of industry instead of
permitting it to be routed in a roundabout fashion through acquisi-
tive individuals, whose knowledge of the community’s needs is em-
pirical and unscientific and whose public interest is vitiated by pri-
vate concerns — if not by outright anti-social animus. Such a change
in the financial structure of our major instruments of production is
a necessary prelude to humanizing the machine. Naturally, this means
a revolution: whether it shall be humane or bloody, whether it shall
be intelligent or brutal, whether it shall be accomplished smoothly,
or with a series of violent shocks and jerks and catastrophes, depends
to a large extent upon the quality of mind and the state of morals
that exists among the present directors of industry and their oppo-
nents.

Now, the necessary impulses toward such a change are already
apparent within the bankrupt structure of capitalist society: during

422 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

its seizures of paralysis, it openly begs for the state to come in and
rescue it and put it once more on its feet. Once the wolf is driven
away, capitalism becomes brave again: but at scarcely any point
during the last century has it been able to live without the help of
state subsidies, state privileges, state tariffs, to say nothing of the
aid of the state in subduing and regimenting the workers when the
two groups have broken out into open warfare. Laissez-faire is in
fact advocated and preached by capitalism only during those rare
moments when it is doing well without the help of the state: but in
its imperialist phase, laissez-faire is the last thing that capitalism
desires. "What it means by that slogan is not Hands off Industry —
but Hands off Profits! In concluding his monumental survey of
Capitalism Sombart looks upon 1914 as a turning-point for capi-
talism itself. The signs of the change are the impregnation of
capitalistic modes of existence with normative ideas: the displace-
ment of the struggle for profit as the sole condition of orientation
in industrial relations, the undermining of private competition
through the principle of understandings, and the constitutional or-
ganization of industrial enterprise. These processes, which have ac-
tually begun under capitalism, have only to be pushed to their logical
conclusions to carry us beyond the capitalist order. Rationalization,
standardization, and above all, rationed production and consumption,
on the scale necessary to bring up to a vital norm the consumptive
level of the whole community — ^these things are impossible on a
sufficient scale without a socialized political control of the entire
process.

If such a control cannot be instituted with the cooperation and in-
telligent aid of the existing administrators of industry, it must be
achieved by overthrowing them and displacing them. The applica-
tion of new norms of consumption, as in the housing of workers, has
during the last thirty years won the passive support, sometimes sub-
sidies drawn from taxation, of the existing governments of Europe,
from conservative London to communistically bent Moscow. But such
commxmities, while they have challenged and supplemented capitalist
enterprise, are merely indications of the way in which the wind is
blowing. Before we can replan and reorder our entire environment,

ORIENTATION

423

on a scale commensurate with our human needs, the moral and legal
and political basis of our productive system will have to he sharply
revised. Unless such a revision takes place, capitalism itself will be
eliminated by internal rot: lethal struggles will take place between
states seeking to save themselves by imperialist conquest, as they will
take place between classes within the state, jockeying for a power
which will take the form of brute force just to the extent that society’s
grip on the productive mechanism itself is weakened.

11: The Diminution of the Machine

Most of the current fantasies of the future, which have been sug-
gested by the triumph of the machine, are based upon the notion that
our mechanical environment will become more pervasive and oppres-
sive. Within the past generation, this belief seemed justified: Mr.
H. G. Wells’s earlier tales of The War of the Worlds and When the
Sleeper Wakes, predicted horrors, great and little, from gigantic
aerial combats to the blatant advertisement of salvation by go-getting
Protestant churches — ^horrors that were realized almost before the
words had left his mouth.

The belief in the greater dominance of mechanism has been re-
enforced by a vulgar error in statistical interpretation : the belief that
curves generated by a past historic complex will continue without
modification into the future. Not merely do the people who hold
these views imply that society is immune to qualitative changes: they
imply that it exhibits uniform direction, uniform motion, and even
uniform acceleration — a fact which holds only for simple events in
society and for very minor spans of time. The fact is that social pre-
dictions that are based upon past experience are always retrospec-
tive: they do not touch the real future. That such predictions have
a way of justifying themselves from time to time i? due to another
fact: namely that in what Professor John Dewey calls judgments
of practice the hypothesis itself becomes one of the determining
elements in the working out of events: to the extent that it is seized
and acted upon it weights events in its favor. The doctrine of
mechanical progress doubtless had such a role in the nineteenth
century.

424 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

What reason is there to believe that the machine will continue to
multiply indefinitely at the rate that characterized the past, and that
it will take over even more territory than it has already conquered?
While the inertia of society is great, the facts of the matter lend
themselves to a different interpretation. The rate of growth in all the
older branches of machine production has in fact been going down
steadily: Mr. Bassett Jones even holds that this is generally true of
all industry since 1910. In those departments of mechanical industry
that were well-established by 1870, like the railroad and the textile
mill, this slowing down applies likewise to the critical inventions.
Have not the conditions that forced and speeded the earlier growth —
namely, the territorial expansion of Western Civilization and the tre-
mendous increase in population — ^been diminishing since that point?

Certain machines, moreover, have already reached the limit of
their development: certain areas of scientific investigation are already
completed. The printing press, for example, reached a high pitch of
perfection within a century after its invention: a whole ^ succession
of later inventions, from the rotary press to the linotype and mono-
type machines, while they have increased the pace of production, have
not improved the original product: the finest page that can be pro-
duced today is no finer than the work of the sixteenth century printers.
The water turbine is now ninety per cent efficient; we cannot, on any
count, add more than ten per cent to its efficiency. Telephone trans-
mission is practically perfect, even over long distances; the best the
engineers can now do is to multiply the capacity of the wires and to
extend the inter -linkages. Distant speech and vision cannot be trans-
mitted faster than they are transmitted today by electricity: what
gains we can make are in cheapness and ubiquity. In short: there
are bounds to mechanical progress within the nature of the physical
world itself. It is only by ignoring these limiting conditions that a be-
lief in the automatic and inevitable and limitless expansion of the
machine can be retained.

And apart from any wavering of interest in the machine, a general
increase in verified knowledge in other departments than the physical
sciences already threatens a large curtailment of mechanical practices
and instruments. It is not a mystic withdrawal from the practical con-

ORIENTATION

425

cems of the world that challenges the machine so much as a more
comprehensive knowledge of phenomena to which our mechanic con-
trivances were only partial and ineffective responses. Just as, within
the domain of engineering itself, there has been a growing tendency
toward refinement and efficiency through a nicer inter-relation of
parts, so in the environment at large the province of the machine has
begun to shrink. When we think and act in terms of an organic whole,
rather than in terms of abstractions, when we are concerned with life
in its full manifestation, rather than with the fragment of it that
seeks physical domination and that projects itself in purely mechan-
ical systems, we will no longer require from the machine alone what
we should demand through a many-sided adjustment of every other
aspect of life. A finer knowledge of physiology reduces the number
of drugs and nostrums in which the physician places confidence: it
also decreases the number and scope of surgical operations — ^those
exquisite triumphs of machine-technics! — so that although refinements
in technique have increased the number of potential operations that
can be resorted to, competent physicians are tempted to exhaust the
resources of nature before utilizing a mechanical shortcut. In general,
the classic methods of Hippocrates have begun to displace, with a
new certitude of conviction, both the silly potions prescribed in
Moliere’s Imaginary Invalid and the barbarous intervention of Mr.
Surgeon Cuticle. Similarly, a sounder notion of the human body
has relegated to the scrapheap most of the weight-lifting apparatus
of late Victorian gymnastics. The habit of doing without hats and
petticoats and corsets has, in the past decade, thrown whole industries
into limbo: a similar fate, through the more decent attitude toward
the naked human body, threatens the bathing suit industry. Finally,
with a great part of the utilities, like railroads, power lines, docks,
port facilities, automobiles, concrete roads which we constructed so
busily during the last hundred years, we are now on a basis where
repair and replacement are all that is required. As our production
becomes more rationalized, and as population shifts and regroups in
better relationship to industry and recreation, new communities de-
signed to the human scale are being constructed. This movement
which has been taking place in Europe during the last generation is

426 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

a result of pioneering work done over a century from Robert Owen
to Ebenezer Howard. As these new communities are built up the
need for the extravagant mechanical devices like subways, which
were huilt in response to the disorganization and speculative chaos of
the megalopolis, will disappear.

In a word, as social life becomes mature, the social unemployment
of machines will become as marked as the present technological un-
employment of men. Just as the ingenious and complicated mechan-
isms for inflicting death used by armies and navies are marks of inter-
national anarchy and painful collective psychoses, so are many of our
present machines the reflexes of poverty, ignorance, disorder. The
machine, so far from being a sign in our present civilization of hu-
man power and order, is often an indication of ineptitude and social
paralysis. Any appreciable improvement in education and culture
will reduce the amoimt of machinery devoted to multiplying the
spurious mechanical substitutes for knowledge and experience now
provided through the channels of the motion picture, the tabloid news-
paper, the radio, and the printed book. So, too, any appreciable im-
provement in the physical apparatus of life, through better nutrition,
more healthful housing, sounder forms of recreation, greater oppor-
tunities for the natural enjoyments of life, will decrease the part
played by mechanical apparatus in salvaging wrecked bodies and
broken minds. Any appreciable gain in personal harmony and bal-
ance will be recorded in a decreased demand for compensatory
goods and services. The passive dependence upon the machine that
has characterized such large sections of the Western World in the
past was in reality an abdication of life. Once we cultivate the arts
of life directly, the proportion occupied by mechanical routine and
by mechanical instruments will again diminish.

Our mechanical civilization, contrary to the assumption of those
who worship its external power the better to conceal their own feeling
of impotence, is not an absolute. All its mechanisms are dependent
upon human aims and desires: many of them flourish in direct pro-
portion to our failure to achieve rational social cooperation and inte-
grated personalities. Hence we do not have to renounce the machine
completely and go back to handicraft in order to abolish a good deal

427

ORIENTATION

of useless machinery and burdensome routine: we merely have to
use imagination and intelligence and social discipline in our traffic
with the machine itself. In the last century or two of social disruption,
we were tempted by an excess of faith in the machine to do every-
thing by means of it. We were like a child left alone with a paint
brush who applies it impartially to unpainted wood, to varnished
furniture, to the tablecloth, to his toys, and to his own face. When,
with increased knowledge and judgment, we discover that some of
these uses are inappropriate, that others are redundant, that others
are inefficient substitutes for a more vital adjustment, we will contract
the machine to those areas in which it serves directly as an instru-
ment of human purpose. The last, it is plain, is a large area: but it is
probably smaller than that now occupied by the machine. One of the
uses of this period of indiscriminate mechanical experiment was to
disclose unsuspected points of weakness in society itself. Like an
old-fashioned menial, the arrogance of the machine grew in propor-
tion to its master’s feebleness and folly. With a change in ideals from
material conquest, wealth, and power to life, culture, and expression,
the machine like the menial with a new and more confident master,
will fall back into its proper place: our servant, not our tyrant.

Quantitatively, then, we shall probably be less concerned with
production in future than we were forced to be during the period of
rapid expansion that lies behind us. So, too, we shall probably use
fewer mechanical instruments than we do at present, although we
shall have a far greater range to select from, and shall have more
skillfully designed, more finely calibrated, more economical and reli-
able contrivances than we now possess. The machines of the future,
if our present technics continues, will surpass those in use at present
as the Parthenon surpassed a neolithic wood-hut: the transformation
will be both toward durability and to refinement of forms. The
dissociation of production from the acquisitive life will favor tech-
nical conservatism on a high level rather than a flashy experimental-
ism on a low level.

But this change will be accompanied by a qualitative change in
interest, too: in general a change from mechanical interest to vital
and psychal and social interests. This potential change in interest is

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

generally ignored in predictions about the future of the machine.
Yet once its importance is grasped it plainly alters every purely quan-
titative prediction that is based upon the assumption that the interests
which for three centuries have operated chiefly within a mechanical
framework will continue to remain forever within that framework.
On the contrary, proceeding under the surface in the work of poets
and painters and biological scientists, in a Goethe, a Whitman, a
von Mueller, a Darwin, a Bernard, there has been a steady shift in
attention from the mechanical to the vital and the social: more and
more, adventure and exhilarating effort wiU lie here, rather than
within the already partly exhausted field of the machine.

Such a shift will change the incidence of the machine and pro-
foundly alter its relative position in the whole complex of human
thought and activity. Shaw, in his Back to Methuselah, put such a
change in a remote future; and risky though prophecy of this nature
be, it seems to me that it is probably already insidiously at work.
That such a movement could not take place, certainly not in science
and its technical applications, without a long preparation in the in-
organic realm is now fairly obvious: it was the relative simplicity of
the original mechanical abstractions that enabled us to develop the
technique and the confidence to approach more complicated phe-
nomena. But while this movement toward the organic owes a heavy
debt to the machine, it will not leave its parent in undisputed posses-
sion of the field. In the very act of enlarging its dominion over human
thought and practice, the machine has proved to a great degree self-
eliminating: its perfection involves in some degree its disappearance
— as a communal water-system, once huilt, involves less daily atten-
tion and less expense on annual replacements than would a hundred
thousand domestic wells and pumps. This fact is fortunate for the
race. It will do away with the necessity, which Samuel Butler sa-
tirically pictured in Erewhon, for forcefully extirpating the danger-
ous troglodytes of the earlier mechanical age. The old machines will
in part die out, as the great saurians died out, to he replaced by
smaller, faster, brainer, and more adaptable organisms, adapted not
to the mine, the battlefield and the factory, but to the positive environ-
ment of life.

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429

12: Toward a Dynamic Equilibrium

The chief justification of the gigantic changes that took place dur-
ing the nineteenth century was the fact of change itself. No matter
what happened to human lives and social relations, people looked
upon each new invention as a happy step forward toward further
inventions, and society went on blindly like a caterpillar tractor, lay-
ing down its new road in the very act of lifting up the old one. The
machine was supposed to abolish the limits of movement and of
growth: machines were to become bigger: engines were to become
more powerful: speeds were to become faster: mass production was
to multiply more vastly: the population itself was to keep on increas-
ing indefinitely until it finally outran the food supply or exhausted
the soil of nitrogen. So went the nineteenth century myth.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or
limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial
century. Limits in thought and action, norms ef growth and develop-
ment, are now as present in our consciousness as they were absent to
the contemporaries of Herbert Spencer. In our technics, countless im-
provements of course remain to be made, and there are doubtless
numerous fresh fields still to be opened; but even in the realm of pure
mechanical achievement we are already within sight of natural limits,
not imposed by human timidity or lack of resources or immature
technics, but by the very nature of the elements with which we work.
The period of exploration and unsystematic, sporadic advance, which
seemed to the nineteenth century to embody the essential character-
istics of the new economy, is rapidly coming to an end. We are now
faced with the period of consolidation and systematic assimilation.
Western Civilization as a whole, in other words, is in the condition
that new pioneering countries like the United States found them-
selves in, once all their free lands had been taken up and their main
lines of transportation and communication laid out: it must now
begin to settle down and make the most of what it has. Our machine
system is beginning to approach a state of internal equilibrium. Dy-
namic equilibrium, not indefinite progress, is the mark of the open-
ing age: balance, not rapid one-sided advance: conservation, not

430 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

reckless pillage. The parallel between neolithic and neotechnic times
holds even here: for the main advances which were consolidated in
neolithic times remained stable, with minor variations within the
pattern, for between 2500 and 3500 years. Once we have generally
reached a new technical plateau we may remain on that level with
very minor ups and down for thousands of years. What are the impli-
cations of this approaching equilibrium?

First: equilibrium in the environment. This means first the restora-
tion of the balance between man and nature. The conservation and
restoration of soils, the re-growth wherever this is expedient and pos-
sible, of the forest cover to provide shelter for wild life and to main-
tain man’s primitive background as a source of recreation, whose im-
portance increases in proportion to the refinement of his cultural
heritage. The use of tree crops where possible as substitutes for
annuals, and the reliance upon kinetic energy — sun, falling water,
wind — instead of upon limited capital supplies. The conservation
of minerals and metals: the larger use of scrap metals. The conser-
vation of the environment itself as a resource, and the fitting of hu-
man needs into the pattern formed by the region as a whole: hence
the progressive restoration out of such unbalanced regions as the
over-urbanized metropolitan areas of London and New York. Is it
necessary to point out that all this marks the approaching end of die
miner’s economy? Not mine and move, but stay and cultivate are
the watchwords of the new order. Is it also necessary to emphasize
that with respect to our use of metals, the conservative use of the
existing supply will lower the importance of the mine in relation to
other parts of the natural environment?

Second: equilibrium in industry and agriculture. This has rapidly
been taking place during the last two generations in the migration
of modem technics from England to America and to the rest of
Europe, and from all these countries in turn to Africa and Asia. No
one center is any longer the home of modem industry or its sole
focal point: the finest work in rapid motion picture photography has
been done in Japan, and the most astounding instrament of cheap
mass production is the Bata Shoe Factories of Czechoslovakia. The
more or less uniform distribution of mechanical industry over every

ORIENTATION

431

portion of the planet tends to produce a balanced industrial life in
every region: ultimately a state of balance over the earth itself. A
similar advance remains to be worked out more largely for agricul-
ture. With the decentralization of population into new centers, en-
couraged by motor and aerial transportation and by giant power,
and with the application of scientific methods to the culture of soils
and the processes of agriculture, as so admirably practiced today in
Belgium and Holland, there is a tendency to equalize advantage be-
tween agricultural regions. With economic regionalism the area of
market gardening and mixed farming — already favored by the scien-
tific transformation of our diet — ^will widen again, and specialized
farming for world export will tend to diminish except where, as in
industry, some region produces specialties that cannot easily be dupli-
cated.

Once the regional balance between industry and agriculture is
worked out in detail, production in both departments will he on a
more stable basis. This stability is the technical side of the normaliza-
tion of consumption with which I have already dealt. Since at bottom
the profit-motive arose out of and was furthered by uncertainty and
speculation, whatever stability specialized capitalism had in the past
rested on its capacity for promoting change, and taking advantage of
it. Its safety rested upon its progressive tendency to revolutionize the
means of production, promote new shifts in population, and take ad-
vantage of the speculative disorder. The equilibrium of capitalism,
in other words, was the equilibrium of chaos. Per contra, the forces
that work toward a normalization of consumption, toward a planned
and rationed production, toward a conservation of resources, toward
a planned distribution of population are in sharp opposition by rea-
son of their essential technics to the methods of the past: hence an in-
herent conflict between this technology and the dominant capitalist
methods of exploitation. As we approach an industrial and agricul-
tural equilibrium part of the raison d’etre of capitalism itself will
vanish.

Third: equilibrium in population. There are parts of the Western
World in which there is a practical balance between the number of
births and deaths: most of these countries, France, Great Britain, the

432

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

United States, the Scandinavian countries, are in a relatively high
state of technical and cultural development. The blind animal pres- *
sure of births, responsible for so many of the worst features of nine-
teenth century development, is now characteristic in the main of back-
ward countries, countries in a state of political or technical inferi-
ority. If equilibrium takes place here during the next century one
may look forward to a rational re-settlement of the entire planet into
the regions most favorable to human habitation: an era of deliberate
recolonization will take the place of those obstreperous and futile
conquests which began with the explorations of the Spaniards and
the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and which have continued
without any essential change down to the most recent raids of the
Japanese. Such an internal re-settlement is already taking place in
many countries: the movement of industries into Southern England,
the development of the French Alps, the settlement of new farmers in
Palestine and Siberia, are first steps toward achieving a state of
equilibrium. The balancing off of the birth-rate and death-rate, and
the balancing off of rural and urban environments — ^with the whole-
sale wiping out of the blighted industrial areas inherited from the
past — are aU part of a single integration.

This state of balance and equilibrium — ^regional, industrial, agri-
cultural, communal — ^will work a further change within the domain
of the machine itself: a change of tempo. The temporary fact of in-
creasing acceleration, which seemed so notable to Henry Adams
when, he surveyed the progress from twelfth century unity to twen-
tieth century multiplicity, the fact which was later accompanied by
a belief in change and speed for their own sake — ^will no longer char-
acterize our society. It is not the absolute speed assumed by any part
of the machine system that indicates efficiency: what is important is
the relative speed of the various parts with a view to the ends to be
accomplished: namely, the maintenance and development of human
life. Efficiency, even on the technical level alone, means a gearing to-
gether of the various parts so that they may deliver the correct and
the predictable amounts of power, goods, services, utilities. To
achieve this efficiency, it may be necessary to lower the tempo rather
than to increase it in this or that department; and as larger portions

ORIENTATION

433

of our days go to leisure and smaller portions to work, as our think-
ing becomes synthetic and related, instead of abstract and pragmatic,
as we turn to the cultivation of the whole personality instead of cen-
tering upon the power elements alone — as all these things come
about we may look forward to a slowing of the tempo throughout
our lives, even as we may look forward to a lessening of the number
of unnecessary external stimuli. Mr. H. G. Wells has characterized
the approaching period as the Era of Rebuilding. No part of our
life, our thought, or our environment can escape that necessity and
that obligation.

The problem of tempo: the problem of equilibrium: the problem
of organic balance: in back of them all the problem of human satis-
faction and cultural achievement — ^these have now become the critical
and all-important problems of modern civilization. To face these
problems, to evolve appropriate social goals and to invent appropri-
ate social and political instruments for an active attack upon them,
and finally to carry them into action: here are new outlets for social
intelligence, social energy, social good will.

13: Summary and Prospect

We have studied the origins, the advances, the triumphs, the lapses,
and the further promises of modern technics. We have observed the
limitations the Western European imposed upon himself in order to
create the machine and project it as a body outside his personal will:
we have noted the limitations that the machine has imposed upon
men through the historic accidents that accompanied its development.
We have seen the machine arise out of the denial of the organic and
the living, and we have in turn marked the reaction of the organic
and the living upon the machine. This reaction has two forms. One
of them, the use of mechanical means to return to the primitive,
means a throwback to lower levels of thought and emotion which
will ultimately lead to the destruction of the machine itself and the
higher types of life that have gone into its conception. The other in-
volves the rebuilding of the individual personality and the collective
group, and the re-orientation of all forms of thought and social ac-
tivity toward life: this second reaction promises to transform the

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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

nature and function of our mechanical environment and to lay wider
and firmer and safer foundations for human society at large. The
issue is not decided: the results are not certain: and where in the
present chapter I have used the prophetic form I have not been blind
to the fact that while all the tendencies and movements I have pointed
to are real, they are still far from being supreme: so when I have
said “it will” I have meant “we must.”

In discussing the modem technics, we have advanced as far as
seems possible in considering mechanical civilization as an isolated
system: the next step toward re-orienting our technics consists in
bringing it more completely into harmony with the new cultural and
regional and societal and personal patterns we have co-ordinately
begun to develop. It would be a gross mistake to seek wholly within
the field of technics for an answer to all the problems that have been
raised by technics. For the instrument only in part determines the
character of the symphony or the response of the audience: the com-
poser and the musicians and the audience have also to be considered.

What shall we say of the music that has so far been produced?
Looking backward on the history of modern technics, one notes that
from the tenth century onward the instruments have been scraping
and tuning. One by one, before the lights were up, new members had
joined the orchestra, and were straining to read the score. By the
seventeenth century the fiddles and the wood-wind had assembled,
and they played in their shrill high notes the prelude to the great
opera of mechanical science and invention. In the eighteenth century
die brasses joined the orchestra, and the opening chorus, with the
metals predominating over the wood, rang through every hall and
gallery of the Western World. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the
human voice itself, hitherto subdued and silent, was timidly sounded
through the systematic dissonances of the score, at the very moment
that imposing instruments of percussion were being introduced. Have
we heard the complete work? Far from it. All that has happened up to
now has been little more than a rehearsal, and at last, having recog-
nized the importance of the singers and the chorus, we will have to
score the music differently, subduing the insistent brasses and the
kettle-drums and giving more prominence to the violins and the

ORIENTATION

435

voices. But if this turns out to be so, our task is even more difficult:
for we will have to re-write the music in the act of playing it, and
change the leader and re-group the orchestra at the very moment that
we are re-casting the most important passages. Impossible? No: for
however far modern science and technics have fallen short of their
inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson:
Nothing is impossible.

INVENTIONS

1: Introduction

This list of inventions makes no pretence to being exhaustive. It is meant
merely to provide an historical framework of technical facts for the social
interpretations of the preceding pages. While I have attempted to choose the
more important inventions and processes, I have doubtless left out many that
have equal claim to appear. The most comprehensive guide to this subject are
the compilations by Darmstaedter and by Feldhaus; but I have drawn from
a variety of sources. The dates and attributions of many inventions, as every
technician knows, must remain somewhat arbitrary. Unlike a human baby,
one often cannot say at what date an invention is born: frequently, indeed,
what was apparently a still birth may be resuscitated a few years after its
first unhappy appearance. And again, with inventions the family lineage
often is hard to establish; for, as W. F. Ogburn and Dorothy S. Thomas
have demonstrated, inventions are often practically simultaneous: the result
of a common heritage and a common need. While I have endeavored to be
both accurate and impartial in giving the date of the invention and the
name of the putative inventor, the reader should keep in mind that these
data are offered only for his convenience in looking further. Instead of a
single date one finds usually a series of dates which mark progress from the
state of pure fantasy to concrete realization in the form that has been most
acceptable to the capitalist mores — that of a commercial success. As a result
of these mores far too much stress has usually been laid upon the individual
who put the title of private ownership upon this social process by taking
out patent rights on “his” invention. But observe: inventions are often
patented long before they can be practicably used, and, on the other hand,
they are often ready for use long before industrial enterprisers are willing
to take advantage of them. Since modern science and technology are part of
the common stock of Western Civilization, I have refused to attribute inven-
tions to one country or another and I have done my best to avoid an un-
conscious bias in weighting the list in behalf of my own country — ^trusting by
my good example to shame the scholars who permit their most childish im-
pulses to flaunt themselves in this field. If any bias or misinformation still
exists, I will welcome corrections.

437

438

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

2: List of Inventions

Summary of the existing technics before the tenth century. Fire; its application
in furnaces, ovens, kilns. The simple machines ; inclined plane, screw, etc. Thread,
cord, rope. Spinning and weaving. Advanced agriculture, including irrigation,
terrace-cultivation, and soil regeneration (lapsed in Northern Europe). Cattle
breeding and the use of the horse for transport. Glass-making, pottery-making,
basket-making. Mining, metallurgy and smithing, including the working of iron.
Power machines : water-mills, boats with sails, probably windmills. Machine-tools :
bow-drills and lathes. Handicraft tools with tempered metal cutting edges. Paper.
Water-clocks. Astronomy, mathematics, physics, and the tradition of science. In
Northern Europe a scattered and somewhat decayed technological tradition based
on Rome ; but South and East, from Spain to China, an advanced and still active
technology, whose ideas were filtering into the West and North through traders.

scholars, and soldiers.

TENTH CENTURY

Use of water-clocks and water-mills.
The iron horse-shoe and an effective
harness for horses. Multiple yoke for
oxen. Possible invention of the me-
chanical clock.

999: Painted glass windows in Eng-
land

ELEVENTH CENTURY

1041-49: Movable type (Pi Sheng)
1050: First real lenses (Alhazen)

1065: Oliver of Malmesbury attempts
flight

1080: Decimal system (Azachel)

TWELFTH CENTURY

Military use of gunpowder in China.
The magnetic compass, known to the
Chinese 1160 b.c., comes into Eu-
rope, via the Arabs.

1105: First recorded windmill in Eu-
rope (France)

1100: Bologna University
1118: Cannon used by Moors
1144: Paper (Spain)

1147: Use of wood cuts for Capital
letters. (Benedictine monas-
tery at Engelberg)

1180: Fixed steering rudder
1188: Bridge at Avignon. 18 stone
arches — 3,000 ft. long

1190: Paper mill (at Herault, France)

1195: Magnetic compass in Europe
(English Citation)

THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Mechanical clocks invented.

1232: Hot-air balloons (in China)

1247: Cannon used in defence of Se-
ville

1269: Pivoted magnetic compass (Pe-
trus Peregrinus)

1270: Treatise on lenses (Vitellio)

Compound lenses (Roger Ba-
con)

1272: Silk reeling machine (Bologna)

1280: Opus Ruralium Commodorum —
Compendium of Agricultural
Practice (Petrus de Crescen-
tis)

1285-1299: Spectacles

1289: Block printing (Ravenna)

1290: Paper mill (Ravensburg)

1298: Spinning wheel

FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Mechanical clock becomes common.
Water-power used to create draft for
blast furnace: makes cast iron pos-
sible. Treadle loom {inventor un-
known). Invention of rudder and be-
ginning of canalization. Improved
glass-making.

1300: Wooden type (Turkestan)

INVENTIONS

1315: Beginnings of Scientific Anatomy
through dissection of human
body (Raimondo de Luzzi of
Bologna)

1320: Water-driven iron works, near
Dobrilugk

1322: Sawmill at Augsburg

1324: Cannon [Gunpowder: 846 a.d.

(Magnus Graecus)]

1330: Crane at Liineburg
1345: Division of hours and minutes
into sixties
1338: Guns

1350: Wire-pulling machine (Rudolph
of Number g)

1370: Perfected mechanical clock (von
Wyck)

1382: Giant cannon — 4.86 metres long
1390: Metal types (Korea)

1390: Paper mill

FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Use of wind-mill for land drainage. In--
vention of turret windmill. Introduc-
tion of knitting. Iron drill for boring
cannon. Trip-hammer. Two-masted
and three-masted ship.

1402: Oil painting (Bros, van Eyck)
1405: Diving suit (Konrad Kyeser von
Eichstadt)

1405: Infernal machine (Konrad Kye-
ser von Eichstadt)

1409: First book in movable type (Ko-
rea)

1410: Paddle-wheel boat designed
1418: Authentic wood engraving
1420: Observatory at Samarkand
1420: Sawmill at Madeira
1420: Velocipede (Fontana)

1420: War-wagon (Fontana)

1423: First European woodcut
1430: Turret windmill
1436: Scientific cartography (Banco)
1438: Wind-turbine (Mariano)

1440: Laws of perspective (Alberti)
1446: Copperplate engraving
1440-1460: Modern printing (Guten-
berg and Schoeffer)

1457: Rediscovery of wagon on springs
referred to by Homer

439

1470: Foundations of trigonometry (J,
Muller Regiomontanus)

1471: Iron cannon balls
1472 : Observatory at Niirnberg by Ber-
nard Walther

1472-1519: Leonardo da Vinci made the
following inventions:
Centrifugal pump
Dredge for canal-building
Polygonal fortress with outworks
Breech-loading cannon
Rifled firearms
Antifriction roller bearing
Universal joint
Conical screw
Rope-and-belt drive
Link chains
Submarine-boat
Bevel gears
Spiral gears

Proportional and paraboloid
Compasses

Silk doubling and winding ap-
paratus

Spindle and flyer
Parachute
Lamp-chimney
Ship’s log

Standardized mass-production
house

1481: Canal lock (Dionisio and Petro
Domenico)

1483: Copper etching (Wenceslaus von
Olnutz)

1492: First globe (Martin Behaim)

SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Tinning for preservation of iron. Wind-
mills of 10 H.P. become common.
Much technical progress and mecha-
nization in mining industries, spread
of blast-furnaces and iron-moulding.
Introduction of domestic clock.

1500: First portable watch with iron
main-spring (Peter Henlein)
1500: Mechanical farming drill (Cav-
allina)

1500-1650: Intricate cathedral clocks
reach height of development
1508: Multicolored woodcut

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

440

1511: Pneumatic beds (Vegetius)

1518: Fire-engine (Platner)

1524: Fodder-cutting machine
1528: Re-invention of taxi meter for
coaches

1530: Foot-driven spinning wheel (Jur-
gens)

1534: Paddle-wheel Boat (Blasco de
Garay)

1535: Diving bell (Francesco del Mar-
chi)

1539: First astronomical map (Ales-
sandro Piccolomini)

1544: Cosmographia Universalis (Se-
bastian Munster)

1544: Elaboration of algebraic symbols
(Stifel)

1545: Modern surgery (Ambroise
Pare)

1546: Railway in German mines
1548: "Water supply by pumping works
(Augsburg)

1550: First known suspension bridge
in Europe (Palladio)

1552: Iron-rolling machine (Brulier)
1558: Military tank
1558: Camera with lens and stop for
diaphragm (Daniello Barbaro)
1560: Accademia Secretorum Naturae
at Naples (first scientific so-
ciety)

1565: Lead pencil (Gesner)

1569: Industrial exhibition at Rathaus,
Number g

1575: Hero’s Opera (translation)

1578: Screw lathe (Jacques Besson)
1579: Automatic ribbon loom at Dant-
zig

1582: Gregorian calendar revision
1582 : Tide-mill pump for London (Mo-
rice)

1585: Decimal system (Simon Stevin)
1589: Knitting frame (William Lee)
1589: Man-propelled wagon (Gilles de
Bom)

1590: Compound microscope (Jansen)
1594: Use of clock to determine longi-
tude

1595: Design for metal bridges — arch
and chain (Veranzio)

1595: Wind-turbine (Veranzio)

1597 : Revolving theater stage

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Water wheels of 20 H.P, introduced:
transmission by means of reciprocat-
ing rods over distance of one-quarter
mile. Glass hothouse comes into use.
Foundations of modern scientific meth-
od. Rapid developments in physics.
1600: Dibbling of wheat to increase
yield (Plat)

1600: Treatise on terrestrial magnetism
and electricity (Gilbert)

1600: Pendulum (Galileo)

1603: Accademia dei Lincei at Rome
1608: Telescope (Lippersheim)

1609: First law of motion (Galileo)
1610: Discovery of gases (Van Hel-
mont)

1613: Gunpowder in mine blasting
1614: Discovery of logarithms by John
Napier

1615: Use of triangulation system in
surveying by Willebrord Snell
van Roijen (1581-1626)

1617: First logarithm table (Henry
Briggs)

1618: Machine for plowing, manuring
and sowing (Ramsay and Wil-
goose)

1619: Use of coke instead of charcoal
in blast furnace (Dudley)
1619: Tile-making machine
1620: Adding machine (Napier)

1624: Submarine (Cornelius Drebbel).
Went two miles in test be-
tween Westminster and Green-
wich

1624: First patent law protecting in-
ventions (England)

1628: Steam engine (described 1663
by Worcester)

1630: Patent for steam engine (David
Ramsey)

1635: Discovery of minute organisms
(Leeuwenhoek)

1636: Infinitesimal calculus (Fermat)
1636: Fountain pen (Schwenter)

1636: Threshing machine (Van Berg)

INVENTIONS 441

1637: Periscope (Hevel, Danzig)

1643: Barometer (Torricelli)

1647: Calculation of focusses of all
forms of lens

1650: Calculating machine (Pascal)
1650: Magic lantern (Kircher)

1652: Air pump (v. Guericke)

1654: Law of probability (Pascal)
1657: Pendulum clock (Huygens)

1658: Balance spring for clocks
(Hooke)

1658: Red corpuscles in blood
( Schwammerdam )

1660: Probability law applied to insur-
ance (Jan de Witt)

1665: Steam automobile model (Ver-
biest, S. J.)

1666: Mirror telescope (Newton)

1667: Cellular structure of plants
(Hooke)

1667: Paris Observatory
1669: Seed drill (Worlidge)

1671: Speaking tube (Morland)

1673: New Type fortification (Vau-
ban)

1675: First determination of speed of
bght (Roemer)

1675: Greenwich Observatory founded
1677: Foundation of Ashmolean Mu-
seum

1678: Power loom (De Gennes)
1679-1681 : First modern tunnel for
transport, 515 feet long, in
Languedoc Canal

1680: First power dredge (Cornelius
Meyer)

1680: Differential calculus (Leibniz)
1680: Gas engine using gunpowder
(Huygens)

1682: Law of gravitation (Newton)
1682: 100 H.P. pumping works at
Marly (Ranneguin)

1683: Industrial Exhibition at Paris
1684: Fodder-chopper run by water-
power (Delabadie)

1685: Foundation of scientific obstet-
rics (Van Deventer)

1687: Newton’s Principia
1688: Distillation of gas from coal
(Clayton)

1695: Atmospheric steam engine (Pa-
pin)

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Rapid improvements in mining and tex-
tile machinery. Foundation of mod-
ern chemistry.

1700: Water power for mass-produc-
tion (Polhem)

1705 : Atmospheric steam engine (New-
comen)

1707 : Physician’s pulse watch with sec-
ond hand (John Floger)

1708: Wet sand iron casting (Darby)
1709: Coke used in blast furnace
(Darby)

1710: First stereotype (Van der Mey
and Muller)

1711: Sewing machine (De Camus)
1714: Mercury thermometer (Fahren-
heit)

1714: Typewriter (Henry Mill)

1716: Wooden railways covered with
iron

1719: Three color printing from cop-
per plate (Le Blond)

1727: First exact measurement of
blood pressure (Stephen
Hales)

1727: Invention of stereotype (Ged)
1727: Light-images with silver nitrate
(Schulze: see 1839)

1730: Stereotyping process (Gold-
smith)

1733: Flying shuttle (Kay)

1733: Roller spinning (Wyatt and
Paul)

1736: Accurate chronometer (Harri-
son)

1736: Commercial manufacture of sul-
phuric acid (Ward)

1738: Cast-iron rail tramway (at
Whitehaven, England)

1740: Cast steel (Huntsman)

1745: First technical school divided
from army engineering at
Braunschweig

1749: Scientific calculation of water
resistance to ship (Euler)
1755: Iron wheels for coal cars

442

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

1756: Cement manufacture (Smeaton)
1763: Modern type chronometer (Le
Roy)

1761: Air cylinders; piston worked by
water wheel. More than tripled
production of blast furnace
(Smeaton)

1763: First exhibition of the industrial
arts. Paris.

1763: Slide rest (French encycl.)
1765-1769 : Improved steam pumping
engine with separate conden-
ser (Watt)

1767 : Cast iron rails at Coalbrookdale
1767: Spinning jenny (Hargreaves)
1769: Steam carriage (Cugnot)

1770: Caterpillar tread (R. L. Edge-
worth: see 1902)

1772: Description of ball-bearing
(Narlo)

1774: Boring machine (Wilkinson)
1775: Beciprocative engine with wheel
1776: Reverberatory furnace (Brothers
Cranege)

1778: Modern water closet (Bramah)
1778: Talking automaton (von Kem-
pelen)

1779: Bridge cast-iron sections (Darby
and Wilkinson)

1781-1786: Steam engine as prime
mover (Watt)

1781: Steamboat (Joufroy)

1781: Drill plow (Proude: also used
by Babylonians: 1700-1200

B.c.)

1782; Balloon (J. M. and J. E, Mont-
golfier) . Original invention
Chinese

1784: Puddling process — ^reverberatory
furnace (Cort)

1784: Spinning mule (Crompton)
1785; Interchangeable parts for mus-
kets (Le Blanc)

1785; First steam spinning mill at
Papplewick

1785: Power loom (Cartwright)

1785: Chlorine as bleaching agent
(Berthollet)

1785: Screw propeller (Bramah)

1787; Iron boat (Wilkinson)

1787: Screw propeller steamboat
(Fitch)

1788: Threshing machine (Meikle)
1790: Manufacture of soda from NaCl
(Le Blanc)

1790: Sewing machine first patented
(M. Saint — England)

1791: Gas engine (Barker)

1792: Gas for domestic lighting (Mur-
dock)

1793: Cotton gin (Whitney)

1793: Signal telegraph (Claude
Chappe)

1794: Ecole Polytechnique founded
1795-1809: Food-canning (Appert)
1796: Lithography (Senefelder)

1796: Natural cement (J. Parker)
1796: Toy helicopter (Cayley)

1796: Hydraulic press (Bramah)

1797: Screw-cutting lathe (Maudslay).

Improved slide-rest metal lathe
(Maudslay)

1799: Humphry Davy demonstrates
anesthetic properties of nitrous
oxide

1799: Conservatoire Nationale des Arts
et Metiers (Paris)

1799; Manufactured bleaching powder
(Tennant)

NINETEENTH CENTURY

Enormous gains in power conversion.
Mass-production of textiles, iron,
steel, machinery. Railway building
era. Foundations of modern biology
and sociology,

1800: Galvanic cell (Volta)

1801: Public railroad with horsepower
— ^W andsworth to Croydon,
England

1801: Steamboat Charlotte Dundas
(Symington)

1801-1802 : Steam carriage (Trevithick)
1802: Machine dresser for cotton
warps (necessary for power
weaving)

1802: Planing machine (Bramah)
1803: Side-paddle steamboat (Fulton)
1804: Jacquard loom for figured fab-
rics

INVENTIONS

443

1804: Oliver Evans amphibian steam
carriage

1805: Twin screw propeller (Stevens)
1807; First patent for gas-driven auto-
mobile (Isaac de Rivaz)

1807 : Kymograph — ^moving cylinder

for recording continuous move-
ment (Young)

1813: Power loom (Horrocks)

1814: Grass tedder (Salmon)

1814: Steam printing press (Koenig)
1817: Push-cycle (Drais)

1818: Milling machine (Whitney)
1818: Stethoscope (Laennec)

1820: Bentwood (Sargent)

1820: Incandescent lamp (De la Rue)
1820: Modern planes (George Rennie)
1821: Iron steamboat (A. Manby)
1822: First Scientific Congress at
Leipzig

1822: Steel alloys (Faraday)

1823: Principle of motor (Faraday)
1823-1843: Calculating machines (Bab-
bage)

1824: Portland cement (Aspdin)

1825: Electro-magnet (William Stur-
geon)

1825: Stockton and Darlington Railway
1825-1843: Thames tunnel (Marc I.
Brunei)

1826: Reaping machine (Bell). First
used in Rome and described
by Pliny

1827: Steam automobile (Hancock)
1827: High pressure steam boiler —
1,400 lbs. (Jacob Perkins)
1827: Chromo-lithography (Zahn)
1828: Hot blast in iron production (J.
B. Nielson)

1828: Machine-made steel pen (Gillot)
1829: Blind print (Braille)

1829: Filtration plant for water (Chel-
sea Water Works, London)
1829: Liverpool and Manchester Rail-
way

1829: Sewing machine (Thimonnier)
1829: Paper matrix stereotype (Ge-
noux)

1830: Compressed air for sinking
shafts and tunnels under wa-
ter (Thomas Cochrane)

1830; Elevators (used in factories)
1831: Reaping machine (McCormick)
1831: Dynamo (Faraday)

1831: Chloroform
1832: Water turbine (Fourneyron)
1833: Magnetic telegraph (Gauss and
Weber)

1833: Laws of Electrolysis (Faraday)
1834: Electric battery in power boat
(M. H. Jacobi)

1834: Anilin dye in coal tar (Runge)
1834: Workable liquid refrigerating
machine (Jacob Perkins)

1835: Application of statistical method
to social phenomena (Quete-
let)

1835: Commutator for dynamo
1835: Electric telegraph
1835: Electric automobile (Davenport)
1836: First application of electric tele-
graph to railroads (Robert
Stephenson)

1837: Electric motor (Davenport)
1837: Needle telegraph (Wheatstone)
1838: Electro-magnetic telegraph
(Morse)

1838: Single wire circuit with ground
(Steinheil)

1838: Steam drop hammer (Nasmyth)
1838: Two-cycle double-acting gas en-
gine (Barnett)

1838: Propeller steamship (Ericsson:
see 1805)

1838: Boat driven by electric motor
(Jacobi)

1839: Manganese steel (Heath)

1839: Electrotype (Jacobi)

1839: Callotype (Talbot)

1839: Daguerreotype (Niepce and Da-
guerre)

1839: Hot vulcanization of rubber
(Goodyear)

1840: Grove’s incandescent lamp
1840: Corrugated iron roof — East
Counties Railroad Station
1840: Micro-photography (Donne)
1840; First steel cable suspension
bridge, Pittsburgh (Roebling)
1841: Paper positives in photography
(Talbot)

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

444

1841: Conservation of energy (von
Mayer)

1842: Electric engine (Davidson)

1842: Conservation of energy (J. R.
von Mayer)

1843: Aerostat (Henson)

1843: Typewriter (Thurber)

1843: Spectrum analysis (Miller)

1843: Gutta percha (Montgomery)
1844: Carbon arc lamp (Foucault)
1844: Nitrous oxide application (Dr.

Horace Wells) : see 1799
1844: Practical wood-pulp paper (Kel-
ler)

1844: Cork-and-rubber linoleum (Gal-
loway)

1845: Electric arc patented (Wright)
1845: Modern high speed sewing ma-
chine (Elias Howe)

1845: Pneumatic tire (Thomson)

1845: Mechanical boiler-stoker
1846: Rotating cylinder press (Hoe)
1846: Ether (Warren and Morton)
1846: Nitroglycerine (Sobrero)

1846: Gun-cotton (C. F. Schonbein)
1847: Chloroform-anaesthetics (J. Y.
Simpson)

1847: Electric locomotive fM. G. Far-
mer)

1847: Iron building (Bogardus)

1848: Modern safety match (R. C.
Bottger)

1848: Rotary fan (Lloyd)

1849: Electric locomotive (Page)

1850; Rotary ventilator (Fabry)

1850; Ophthalmoscope
1851: Crystal Palace. First Interna-
tional Exhibition of Machines
and the Industrial Arts (Jos-
eph Paxton)

1851: Electric motor car (Page)

1851: Electro-magnetic clock (Shep-
herd)

1851: Reaper (McCormick)

1853; Science Museum (London)

1853: Great Eastern steamship — 680
feet long — ^watertight com-
partments

1853: Mechanical ship’s log (William
Semens)

1853: Mass-production watches (Deni-
son, Howard and Curtis)

1853 : Multiple telegraph on single wire
(Gintl)

1854: Automatic telegraph message re-
corder (Hughes)

1855: Commercial production of alum-
inum (Deville)

1855: 800 H.P. water turbine at Paris
1855: Television (Caselle)

1855: Iron-plated gunboats
1855: Safety lock (Yale)

1856: Open hearth furnace (Siemens)
1856: Bessemer converter (Bessemer)
1856: Color photography (Zenker)
1858: Phonautograph. Voice vibrations
recorded on revolving cylinder
(Scott)

1859: Oil mining by digging and drill-
ing (Drake)

1859: Storage cell (Plante)

1860: Ammonia refrigeration (Carre)
1860: Asphalt paving

1860- 1863: London “Underground”

1861- 1864: Dynamo motor (Pacinnoti)
1861: Machine gun (Gatling)

1862: Monitor (Ericsson)

1863: Gas engine (Lenoir)

1863: Ammonia soda process (Solvay)
1864: Theory of light and electricity
(Clerk-Maxwell)

1864: Motion picture (Ducos)

1864 and 1875: Gasoline engine motor
car (S. Marcus)

1865: Pasteurization of wine (L. Pas-
teur)

1866: Practical dynamo (Siemens)
1867: Dynamite (Nobel)

1867: Re-enforced concrete (Monier)
1867: Typewriter (Scholes)

1867: Gas engine (Otto and Langen)
1867: Two-wheeled bicycle (Michaux)
1868: Tungsten steel (Mushet)

1869: Periodic table (Mendelejev and
Lothar Meyer)

1870: Electric steel furnace (Siemens)
1870: Celluloid (J. W. and L S. Hyatt)
1870: Application of hypnotism in psy-
chopathology (Charcot)

1870: Artificial madder dye (Perkin)

INVENTIONS

445

1871: Aniline dye for bacteria staining
(Weigert)

1872: Model airplane (A. Penaud)
1872: Automatic airbrake (Westing-
house)

1873: Ammonia compression refriger-
ator — Carle Linde (Miinchen)
1874: Stream-lined locomotive
1875: Electric car (Siemens)

1875: Standard time (American rail-
roads)

1876: Bon Marche at Paris (Boileau
and G. Eiffel)

1876: Discovery of toxins

1876: Four-cycle gas engine (Otto)

1876: Electric telephone (Bell)

1877: Microphone (Edison)

1877: Bactericidal properties of light
established (Downes & Blunt)
1877: Compressed air refrigerator (J.
J. Coleman)

1877: Phonograph (Edison)

1877: Model flying machine (Kress)
1878: Centrifugal cream separator (De
Laval)

1879: Carbon glow lamp (Edison)
1879: Electric railroad
1880: Cup and cone ball-bearing in
bicycle

1880: Electric elevator (Siemens)
1882: First central power station (Ed-
ison)

1882: Motion picture camera (Marly)
1882: Steam turbine (De Laval)

1883: Dirigible balloon (Brothers Tis-
sandier)

1883: High speed gasoline engine
(Daimler)

1884: Steel-frame skyscraper (Chicago)
1884: Cocaine (Singer)

1884: Linotype (Mergenthaler)

1884: Turbine for High Falls (Pelton)
1884: Smokeless powder (Duttenhofer)
1884: Steam turbine (Parsons)

1885: International standard time
1886: Aluminum by electrolytic process
(Hall)

1886: Hand camera (Eastman)

1886: Aseptic surgery (Bergmann)
1886: Glass-blowing machine
1887: Polyphase alternator (Tesla)

1887: Automatic telephone

1887: Electro-magnetic waves (Hertz)

1887: Monotype (Leviston)

1888: Recording adding machine (Bur-
roughs)

1889: Artificial silk of cotton refuse
(Chardonnet)

1889: Hard rubber phonograph records
1889: Eiffel Tower

1889: Modern motion picture camera
(Edison)

1890: Detector (Branly)

1890: Pneumatic tires on bicycles
1892: Calcium carbide (Willson and
Moissan)

1893-1898: Diesel motor
1892: Artificial silk of wood pulp
(Cross, Bevan and Beadle)
1893: Moving picture (Edison)

1893: By-product coke oven (Hoffman)
1894: Jenkin’s “Phantoscope” — first

moving picture of modern type
1895: Motion picture projector (Ed-
ison)

1895: X-ray (Roentgen)

1896: Steam-driven aerodrome flight —
one half mile without passen-
ger (Langley)

1896: Radio-telegraph (Marconi)
1896: Radio activity (Becquerel)

1898: Osmium lamp (Welsbach)

1898: Radium (Curie)

1898: Garden City (Howard)

1899: Loading coil for long distance
telegraphy and telephony
(Pupin)

TWENTIETH CENTURY

General introduction of scientific and
technical research laboratories,

1900: High speed tool steel (Taylor &
White)

1900: Nernst lamp

1900: Quantum theory (Planck)

1901: National Bureau of Standards —
United States

1902: Caterpillar tread improved. [See
1770]

1902: Radial type airplane engine
(Charles Manly)

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

446

1903: First man-lifting airplane (Or-
ville and Wilbur Wright)
1903: Electric fixation of nitrogen
1903: Arc process nitrogen fixation
(Birkeland and Eyde)

1903: Radio-telephone
1903: Deutsches Museum (Miinchen)
1903: Oil-burning steamer
1903: Tantalum lamp (von Bolton)
1904: Fieury tube
1904: Moore tube light
1905: Rotary mercury pump (Gaede)
1905: Cyanamide process for nitrogen
fixation (Rothe)

1906: Synthetic resins (Baekeland)
1906: Audion (De Forest)

1907 ; Automatic bottle machine (Owen)
1907: Tungsten lamp
1907: Television-photograph (Korn)
1908: Technisches Museum fiir Indus-
trie und Gewerbe (Wien)
1909: Duralumin (Wilm)

1910: Gyro-compass (Sperry)

1910: Synthetic ammonia process for
nitrogen fixation (Haber)
1912: Vitamins (Hopkins)

1913: Tungsten filament light (Cool-
idge)

1920: Radio broadcasting

1922: Perfected color-organ (Wilfred)

1927: Radio television

1933: Aerodynamic motor car (Fuller)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 : General Introduction

Books cannot take the place of first-hand exploration ; hence any study of
technics should begin with a survey of a region, working through from the
actual life of a concrete group to the detailed or generalized study of the
machine. This approach is all the more necessary for the reason that our
intellectual interests are already so specialized that we habitually begin our
thinking with abstractions and fragments which are as difficult to unify by
the methods of specialism as were the broken pieces of Humpty-Dumpty
after he had fallen off the wall. Open-air observation in the field, and ex-
perience as a worker, taking an active part in the processes around us, are
the two fundamental means for overcoming the paralysis of specialism. As
a secondary means for going deeper into technical operations and equip-
ment, particularly for laymen whose training and scope of experience are
limited, the Industrial Museum is helpful. The earliest of these is the Con-
servatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris: educationally however it is a mere
storehouse. The most exhaustive is the Deutsches Museum in Miinchen; but
its collections have a little over-reached themselves in bigness and one loses
sight of the forest for the trees. Perhaps the best sections in it are the
dramatic reconstructions of mines ; this feature has been copied at the Rosen-
wald Museum in Chicago. The Museums in Wien and in London both have
educational value, without being overwhelming. One of the best of the small
museums is the Museum of Science and Industry in New York. The new
museum of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and that of the Smith-
sonian Institution in Washington are respectively the latest and the oldest in
the United States. The Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society at
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is full of interesting eotechnic relics.

Up to the present the only general introductions in English of any value
have been Stuart Chase’s Men and Machines and Harold Rugg’s The Great
Technology. Each has the limitation of historical foreshortening; but Chase
is good in his description of modern technical improvements and Rugg is

447

448

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

valuable for his various educational suggestions. There is no single, com-
prehensive and adequate history of technics in English. Usher’s A History of
Mechanical Inventions is the nearest approach to it. While it does not cover
every aspect of technics, it treats critically and exhaustively whatever it
does touch, and the earlier chapters on the equipment of antiquity and the
development of the clock are particularly excellent summaries. It is perhaps
the most convenient and accurate work in English. In German the series of
books done by Franz Marie Feldhaus, particularly his Ruhmesbldtter der
Technik^ would be valuable for their illustrations alone; they form the core
of any historical library. Both Usher and Feldhaus are useful for their com-
ments on sources and books. Topping all these books is that monument of
twentieth century scholarship, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, by Werner Som-
bart. There is scarcely any aspect of Western European life from the tenth
century on that has escaped Sombart’s eagle-like vision and mole-like in-
dustry; and his annotated bibliographies would almost repay publication
by themselves. The Evolution of Modern Capitalism^ by J. A. Hobson,
parallels Sombart’s work; and while the original edition drew specially on
English sources his latest edition openly acknowledges a debt to Sombart. In
America Thorstein Veblen’s works, taken as a whole, including his less-
appreciated books like Imperial Germany and The Nature of Peace, form a
unique contribution to the subject. For the resources of modern technics
Erich Zimmerman’s recent survey of World Resources and World Industries
fills what up to recently had been a serious gap ; this is complemented, in a
degree, by H. G. Wells’s somewhat diffuse study of the physical processes
of modern life in his The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind.

For further comment on some of the more important books see the fol-
lowing list. The Roman numerals in brackets refer to the relevant chapter
or chapters.

2: List of Books

Ackerman, A. P., and Dana, R. T.: The Human Machine in Industry. New
York: 1927.

Adams, Henry: The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. New York: 1919.
Adams’s attempt to adapt the Phase Rule to social phenomena, though unsound, re-
sulted in a very interesting prediction for the final phase, which corresponds, in effect,
to our neotechnic one. [v]

Agricola, Georgius: De Re Metallica. First Edition: 1546. Translated from
edition of 1556 by H. C. Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, 1912.

One of the great classics in technics. Gives a cross section of advanced technical
practices in the heavy industries in the early sixteenth century. Important for any just
estimate of eotechnic achievement, [ii, iii, iv]

Albion, R. G.: Introduction to Military History. New York: 1929. [n]

449

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allport, Floyd A* : Institutional Behavior, Chapel Hill : 1933.

A critical and on the whole fair analysis of the defects in the current gospel of labor-
saving and enforced leisure : much better than Borsodi though afflicted with a little of
the same middle class suburban romanticism, [vi, viii]

Andrade, E. N.: The Mechanism of Nature. London: 1930.

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: National
and World Planning. Philadelphia: July 1932.

Appier, Jean, and Thybourel, F. : Recueil de Plusieurs Machines Militaires et
Feux Artificiels Pour la Guerre et Recreation. Pont-a-Mousson : 1620.
[n]

Ashton, Thomas S.: Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution. New York:
1924.

Useful introduction to the subject, perhaps the best in English. But see Ludwig Beck,
[ii, IV, v]

Babbage, Charles: On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. Second
Edition. London: 1832. [iv]

One of the landmarks in paleotechnic thought, by a distinguished British mathe-
matician.

Exposition of 1851; or. Views of the Industry, the Science and the Gov-
ernment of England. Second Edition. London: 1851.

Bacon, Francis: Of the Advancement of Learning. First Edition. London:
1605.

A synoptic survey of the gaps and achievements of eotechnic knowledge: pre-
Galilean in its conception of scientific method but nevertheless highly suggestive,
[i, III]

Novum Organum. First Edition. London: 1620.

The New Atlantis. First Edition. London : 1660.

An incomplete utopia, useful only as an historical document. For a more intimate
view of current technics and a new industrial order, see J. V. Andreae’s Christianop-
olis.

Bacon, Roger: Opus Majus. Translated by Robert B. Burke. Two vols. Phil-
adelphia: 1928. [i. III]

To be read in connection with Thorndike, who perhaps is a little too depreciative
of Bacon, in reaction against the praise of those who know no other example of
medieval science.

Baker, Elizabeth: Displacement of Men by Machines; Effects of Technologi-
cal Change in Commercial Printing. New York: 1933. [v, viil]

Good factual study of the changes within a single industry that combines tradition
and steady technical progress.

Banfield, T. C. : Organization of Industry. London : 1848.

Barclay, A. : Handbook of the Collections Illustrating Industrial Chemistry.
Science Museum, South Kensington. London: 1929. [iv, v]

Like the other handbooks put out by the Science Museum it is admirable in scope
and method and lucidity: more than mere handbooks, these essays should not be
absent from a working library on modern technics.

450

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Barnett, George: Chapters on Machinery and Labor, Cambridge: 1926.

Factual discussion of the displacement of labor by automatic machines, [v, viii]

Bartels, Adolph: Der Bauer in der Deutschen Vergangenheit. Second Edi-
tion. Jena: 1924,

Like the other books in this series, richly illustrated.

Bavink, Bernhard: The Anatomy of Modern Science, Translated from Ger-
man. Fourth Edition. New York; 1932.

A useful survey whether or not one accepts Bavink’s metaphysics [i]

Bayley, R. C.; The Complete Photographer, Ninth Edition. London: 1926.
The best general book in English on the history and technique of modern photography,
[v, vii]

Beard, Charles A. (Editor) : Whither Mankind, New York: 1928.

Toward Civilization, New York: 1930 [vii, viii]

The first book attempts to answer how far and in what manner various aspects of
life have been affected by science and the machine. The second is a confident and
somewhat muddled apology for modern technics, which however is prefaced by an
excellent critical essay by the editor.

Bechtel, Heinrich: Wirtschaftsstil des Deutschen Spdtmittelalters, Miinchen:
1930. [Ill]

Follows in detail the trail blazed by Sombart: treats art and architecture along with
industry and commerce. Good section on mining.

Beck, Ludwig: Die Geschichte des Eisens in Technischer und KulturgeschichU
licher Beziehung, Five vols. Braunschweig : 1891-1903. [ii, ill, iv, v]

A monumental work of the first order.

Beck, Theodor: Beitrdge zur Geschichte des Machinenbaues, Second Revised
Edition. Berlin: 1900. [r, ill, iv]

Because it summarizes the achievements and the technical books of the early Italian
and German engineers, it has special value for the historical student.

Beckmann, J.: Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen, Five vols, Leipzig;
1783-1788. Translated: A History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins,
London: 1846.

The first treatise on the history of modern technics; not to be lightly passed over
even today. Particularly interesting because, like Adam Smith’s classic, it shows the
bent of eotechnic thought before the paleotechnic revolution.

Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward. First Edition. Boston: 1888. New Edi-
tion. Boston: 1931. [viii]

A somewhat dehumanized utopia which has nevertheless gained rather than lost
ground during the last generation. It is in the tradition of Cabet rather than Morris.

Bellet, Daniel: La Machine et la Main-d^ CEuvre Humaine. Paris: 1912.
U Evolution de V Industrie, Paris: 1914.

Bennet and Elton : History of Commercial Milling, [iii]

Useful work. But see Usher’s criticism.

Bennett, C. N.: The Handbook of Kinematography, Second Edition. London:
1913.

Bent, Silas: Machine Made Man, New York: 1930.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

451

Berdrow, Wilhelm: Alfred Krupp, Two vols. Berlin: 1927. [iv]

Exhaustive picture of one of the great paleotects: but curiously incomplete in its
lack of reference to his pioneer work in housing.

Berle, Adolf A., Jr.: The Modern Corporation and Private Property, New
York: 1933. [viii]

Excellent factual study of the concentration of modern finance in the United States
and the difficulty of applying our usual legal concepts to the situation. But cautious
to the point of downright timidity in its recommendations.

Besson, Jacques; Theatre des Instruments Mathematiques et Mechaniques,
Geneve: 1626. [ill]

The work of a sixteenth century mathematician who was also a brilliant technician.

Biringucci, Vannuccio: De la Pirotechnia, Venice: 1540. Translated into
German. Braunschweig: 1925. [iii]

Blake, George G. : History of Radiotelegraphy and Telephony, London: 1926.
[V]

Bodin, Charles: Economie Dirigee, Economie Scientifique. Paris: 1932.
Conservative opposition.

Boissonade, Prosper: Life and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Fifth to Fifteenth
Centuries, New York: 1927. [iii]

A good contribution to a well-conceived and well-edited series.

Booth, Charles: Life and Labor in London, Seventeen vols. Begun 1889.
London: 1902. [iv]

Factual picture, massive and complete, of the level of life in a great imperial metrop-
olis. See also the later and more compact survey.

Borsodi, Ralph: This Ugly Civilization, New York: 1929. [vi]

An attempt to show that with the aid of the electric motor and modern machines
household industry may compete with mass production methods. See Kropotkin for
a far sounder statement of this thesis.

Bottcher, Alfred: Das Scheinglilck der Technik, Weimar: 1932. [vi]

Bourdeau, Louis: Les Forces de T Industrie: Progres de la Puissance Humaine.
Paris: 1884.

Bouthoul, Gaston: U Invention, Paris: 1930. [i]

Bowden, Witt: Industrial Society in England Toward the End of the Eight-
eenth Century, New York: 1925. [iv]

Should be supplemented with Mantoux and Halevy.

Boyle, Robert: The Sceptical Chymist, London: 1661.

Bragg, William: Creative Knowledge: Old Trades and New Science, New
York: 1927.

Brandt, Paul: Schaffende Arbeit und Bildende Kunst, Vol. I: ^Tm Altertum
und Mittelalter.” [i, ii, in] Vol. II: “Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart.”
Leipzig: 1927. [iii, iv]

Draws on the important illustrations of Stradanus, Ammann, Van Vliet and Luyken
for presentation of eotechnic industry. But fails to utilize French sources sufficiently.

452

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Branford, Benchara : A New Chapter in the Science of Government. London :
1919. [vm]

Branford, Victor (Editor) : The Coal Crisis and the Future: A Study of So-
cial Disorders and Their Treatment. London: 1926. [v]

Coal — Ways to Reconstruction. London: 1926.

Branford, Victor, and Geddes, P.: The Coming Polity. London: 1917. [v]
An application of Le Play and Comte to the contemporary situation.

Our Social Inheritance. London: 1919. [viii]

Branford, Victor: Interpretations and Forecasts: A Study of Survivals and
Tendencies in Contemporary Society, New York: 1914.

Science and Sanctity. London: 1923, [i, vi, viii]

The most comprehensive statement of Branford’s philosophy: at times obscure, at
times wilful, it is nevertheless full of profound and penetrating ideas.

Brearley, Harry C.: Time Telling Through the Ages. New York: 1919. [i]

Brocklehurst, H. J., and Fleming, A. P. M. : ^ History of Engineering. Lon-
don: 1925.

Browder, E. R.: Is Planning Possible Under Capitalism? New York: 1933.

Buch der Erfindungen, Gewerbe und Industrien. Ten vols. Ninth Edition.
Leipzig: 1895-1901.

Biiclier, Karl: Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig: 1924. [i, ii, vii]

A unique contribution to the subject which has been expended and modified in the
course of numerous editions. A fundamental discussion of esthetics and industry.

Buckingham, James Silk: National Evils and Practical Remedies. London:
1849. [iv]

The quintessence of paleotechnic reformism: a utopia whose defects like that of
Richardson’s Hygeia, bring out the characteristics of the period.

Budgen, Norman F.: Aluminium and Its Alloys. London: 1933. [v]

Burr, William H.: Ancient and Modern Engineering. New York: 1907.

Butler, Samuel: Erewhon^ or Over the Range. First Edition. London: 1872.
Describes an imaginary country where people have given up machines and carrying
a watch is a crime. While looked upon as pure sport and satire in Victorian times,
it points to an unconscious fear of the machine that still survives, not without some
reason.

Butt, 1. N., and Harris, I. S.: Scientific Research and Human Welfare, New
York: 1924. ' ^

Popular.

Buxton, L. H. D. : Primitive Labor. London: 1924. [ii]

Bym, Edward W.: Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century. New
York: 1900. [iv]

Useful synopsis of inventions and processes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

453

Campbell, Argyll, and Hill, Leonard: Health and Environment. London:

1925. [iv, v]

Full of valuable data on the defects of the paleotechnic environment.

Capek, Karel: R,U.R. New York: 1923. [v]

A play that antedated Mr. Televox, the modern automaton. Its drama, dealing *with
the revolt of the mechanized robot upon becoming slightly human, is spoiled by a
sloppy ending. A signpost in the revolt against excessive mechanization: like Rice’s
The Adding Machine and O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape.

Carter, Thomas F. : The Invention of Printing in China and Us Spread West-
ward. New York: 1931. [iii]

A brilliant book which adds an important supplement to Usher’s chapter on printing.
All but establishes the last link in the chain that binds the appearance of printing
in Europe to its earlier development — ^including cast metal types — in China and Korea.

Casson, H. N.: Kelvin: His Amazing Life and Worldwide Influence. London:
1930. [v]

History of the Telephone. Chicago: 1910.

Chase, Stuart: Men and Machines. New York: 1929. [iv, v, vm]

Superficial but suggestive.

The Nemesis of American Business. New York: 1931. [v]

See study of A. 0. Smith plant.

The Promise of Power. New York: 1933. [v]

Technocracy; an Interpretation. New York: 1933.

The Tragedy of Waste. New York: 1925. [v, vm]

The best of Chase’s books to date, probably: full of useful material on the perversions
of modern commerce and industry.

Chittenden, N. W. : Life of Sir Isaac Neivton. New York, 1848.

Clark, Victor S.: History of Manufactures in the United States. (1607-1928.)
Three vols. New York: 1929. [iii, iv]

Since the eotechnic period lingered, even in advanced parts of the country, till the
third quarter of the nineteenth century this work is a valuable study of late eotechnic
practices — ^including surface mining.

Clay, Reginald S., and Court, Thomas H.: The History of the Microscope.
London: 1932. [ill]

Clegg, Samuel: Architecture of Machinery: An Essay on Propriety of Form
and Proportion. London: 1852. [vii]

Cole, G. D. H.: Life of Robert Owen. London: 1930.

Good study of an important industrialist and utopian whose pioneer ideas on indus-
trial management and city building are still bearing fruit.

Modern Theories and Forms of Industrial Organisation. London: 1932.

[VIIl]

Cooke, R. W. Taylor; Introduction to History of Factory System. London;
1886.

Good historic perspective; but must now be supplemented by Somhart’s data, [in, iv]

Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Revolution Durch Technik. Wien: 1932.

454

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Coulton, G. G,: Art and the Reformation. New York: 1928. [i, ill]

Court, Thomas H., and Clay, Reginald S,: The History of the Microscope^
London: 1932. [iii]

Crawford, M. D. C.: The Heritage of Cotton. New York: 1924. [iv]

Cressy, Edward: Discoveries and Inventions of the Twentieth Century. Third
Edition. New York: 1930. [v]

For the layman,

Dahlberg, Arthur: Jobs, Machines and Capitalism. New York: 1932. [v, viii]
An attempt to solve the problem of labor displacement under technical improvement.

Dampier, Sir William: A History of Science and Its Relations with Philos-
ophy and Religion. New York: 1932. [i]

Dana, R. T., and Ackerman, A. P.: The Human Machine in Industry. New
York: 1927.

Daniels, Emil: Geschichte des Kriegswesens. Six vols, (Sammlung Goschen)
Leipzig: 1910-1913. [ii, in, iv]

Perhaps the best small general introduction to the development of warfare.

Darmstaedter, Ludwig, and others: Handbuch zur Geschichte der Naturwis-
senschaften und der Techrdh: In Chronologischer Darstellung. Second
Revised and Enlarged Edition. Berlin: 1908. [i-viii]

An exhaustive compendium of dates, hut better for science than technics.

Demmin, Auguste Frederic: Weapons of War: Being a History of Arms and
Armour from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London: 1870.
[II]

Descartes, Rene: A Discourse on Method. First Edition. Leyden: 1637.

One of the foundation stones of seventeenth century metaphysics: not seriously chal-
lenged in science — except among physiologists like Claude Bernard — ^till Mach.

Dessauer, Friedrich: Philosophic der Technik. Bonn: 1927.

A book with a high reputation in Germany; but a little given to laboring the obvious.

Deutsches Museum: Amtlicher Fuhrer durch die Sammlungen. Miinchen:
1928.

Diamond, Moses: Evolutionary Development of Reconstructive Dentistry.
Reprinted from the New York Medical Journal and Medical Record.
New York: August, 1923. [v]

Diels, Hermann: Antike Technik. First Edition. Berlin: 1914. Second Edl
tion. 1919.

Dixon, Roland B.: The Building of Cultures. New York: 1928.

Dominian, L.: The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe. New
York: 1917. [vi]

Douglas, Clifford H.: Social Credit. Third Edition. London: 1933.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 455

Dulac, A., and Renard, G.: U Evolution Industrielle et Agricole depuis Cent
Cinquante Ans, [iv, v]

Good picture of the last century and a half’s development.

Dyer, Frank L., and Martin, T. C.: Edison: His Life and Inventions, New
York: 1910.

Eckel, E. C. : CoaL Iron and War: A Study in Industrialism, Past and Future,
New York: 1920.

Interesting study arising in part out of the stresses of the World War.

Economic Significance of Technological Progress: A Report to the Society
of Industrial Engineers, New York: 1933. [v, vill]

A summary by a committee of which Polakov was chairman: see Polakov.

Eddington, A. S.: The Nature of the Physical World, New York: 1929. [viii]
Eglofi, Gustav: Earth Oil, New York: 1933. [v]

Ehrenberg, Richard: Das Zeitalter der Fugger, Jena: 1896. Translated.
Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance, New York: 1928.
[i, II, III]

Elton, John, and Bennett, Richard: History of Corn Milling, Four vols. Lon-
don: 1898-1904.

Encyclopedic (en folio) des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, Recueil de
Planches, Paris: 1763. [iii]

A cross section of European technics in the middle of the eighteenth century, with
special reference to France, which by then had taken the lead from Holland. The
detailed explanation and illustration of processes give it special importance. The
engravings I have used are typical of the whole work. The Encyclopedie has been
slighted by German historians of technics. In its illustration of the division of labor
it is a graphic commentary on Adam Smith.

Engelhart, Viktor: Weltanschauung und Technik. Leipzig: 1922.

Engels, Friedrich: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,
Translated. London: 1892. [iv]

Firsthand picture of the horrors of paleotechnic industrialism during one of its
greatest crises: further documentation has enriched, but not lightened, Engels’ de-
scription. See the Hammonds.

Engels, Friedrich, and Marx, Karl: Manifesto of the Communist Party, New
York: 1930. [iv]

Enock, C. R.: Can We Set the World in Order? The Need for a Constructive
World Culture; An Appeal for the Development and Practice of a Science
of Corporate Life ,,, a New Science of Geography and Industry Plan-
ning. London: 1916. [v, viii]

A book whose pertinent criticisms and originality atones for the streak of crotcheti-
ness in it.

Erhard, L.: Der Weg des Geistes in der Technik, Berlin: 1929.

Espinas, Alfred: Les Origines de la Technologic. Paris: 1899.

Ewing, J. Alfred: An Engineer's Outlook, London: 1933. [v, vm]

456

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Drastic criticism of the failure of morals and politics to keep pace with the machine:
suggestion for reducing the tempo of invention till we have mastered our difficulties.
Noteworthy because of Ewing’s professional eminence.

Eyth, Max: Lebendige Krafte; Sieben Vortrage aus dem Gebiete der Technih
First Edition. Berlin: 1904. Third Edition. Berlin: 1919.

Farnham, Dwight T., and others: Profitable Science in Industry, New York:
1925.

Feldhaus, Franz Maria: Leonardo; der Techniker und Er finder, Jena: 1913.

[ni]

Die Technih der Vorzeit; der Geschichtlichen Zeit und der Naturvolker,
Leipzig: 1914.

Ruhmesbldtter der Technik von der Urerfindungen bis zur Gegenwart. Two
vols. Second Edition. Leipzig: 1926. [i-viii]

An invaluable work.

Kulturgeschichte der Technik, Two vols. Berlin: 1928. [l-Vlll]

Lexikon der Erfindungen und Entdeckungen auf den GeHeten der Natur^
wissenschaften und Technik, Heidelberg: 1904.

Technik der Antike und des Mittelalters, Potsdam: 1931. [ill]

Although not always exhaustive in his treatment of sources outside Germany or the
German literature of the subject, Feldhaus has placed the student of the historical
development of technics under a constant debt.

Ferrero, Gina Lombroso: The Tragedies of Progress, New York: 1931.

A weak book which exaggerates the virtues of the past and does not succeed in pre-
senting a drastic enough criticism of the present, despite the obvious bias against
it. [vi]

Field, J. A.: Essays on Population, Chicago: 1931. [v]

Flanders, Ralph: Taming Our Machines: The Attainment of Human Values
in a Mechanized Society, New York: 1931. [v, viii]

Essays by an engineer who realizes that the machine age is not a pure utopia.

Fleming, A. P. M., and Brocklehurst, H. J.: ^ History of Engineering, Lon-
don: 1925.

Fleming, A. P. M., and Pearce, J. G.: Research in Industry, London: 1917.

Foppl, Otto: Die Weiterentwicklung der Menschheit mit Hilfe der Technik,
Berlin : 1932.

Ford, Henry: Today and Tomorrow, New York: 1926.

Moving Forward, New York: 1930.

My Life and Work, New York: 1926. [v, viii]

Important because of Ford’s industrial power and his almost instinctive recognition
of the necessities for neotechnic reorganization of industry: but vitiated by the cant
that is so often associated with an American’s good intentions, particularly when he
must justify his arbitrary financial power.

Form^ Die, Fortnightly organ of the Deutscher Werkbund,

Between 1925 and January 1933 the most important periodical dealing with all the arts
of form, both in the hand-crafts and the machine-crafts. While the leadership here has
now passed back again to France, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries

BIBLIOGRAPHY 457

Die Form remains an indispensable record of Germany’s short but genuinely creative
outburst. Evil]

Fournier, Edouard: Curiosites des Inventions et Decouvertes. Paris: 1855.
Fox, R. M.: The Triumphant Machine. London: 1928.

Frank, Waldo: The Rediscovery of America. New York: 1929. [vi]

Some valuable comments on the subjective effects of mechanization.

Freeman, Richard A.: Social Decay and Regeneration. London: 1921, [vi]
An upper class criticism of the machine from the standpoint of human deterioration
resulting. See Allport for a more intelligent statement.

Fremont, Charles: Origines et Evolution des Outils. Paris: 1913.

Frey, Dagobert: Gotik und Renaissance als Grundlagen der Modernen We-
lanschauung. Augsburg: 1929. [i, vii]

A brilliant and welbillustrated study of a dijUcult, delicate and fascinating subject.

Friedell, Egon: A Cultural History of the Modern Age. Three vols. New
York: 1930-1932.

Usually witty, sometimes inaccurate, occasionally obscurantist: not to be trusted
about matters of fact, but, like Spengler, occasionally valuable for oblique revelations
not achieved by more academically competent minds.

Frost, Dr. Julius: Die Hollandische Landwirtschaft; Ein Muster Moderner
Rationalisierung. Berlin: 1930.

Gage, S. H.: The Microscope. Revised Edition. Ithaca: 1932. [ill]

Galilei, Galileo: Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. New York: 1914.

[i, III]

A classic.

Gantner, Joseph: Revision der Kunstgeschichte. Wien: 1932. [vii]

Suggests the necessity of revision in historical judgments upon the basis of new in-
terests and values. The author was editor of the brilliant if short-lived Die Neue Stadt.

Gantt, H. L.: Work, Wages and Profits. New York: 1910.

One of the landmarks of the ej05ciency movement by a contemporary of Taylor’s who
had advanced beyond the master’s original narrow position.

Garrett, Garret: Ourohoros, or the Future of the Machine. New York: 1926.

Gaskell, P.: Artisans and Machinery ; The Moral and Physical Condition of
the Manufacturing Population Considered with Reference to Mechanical
Substitutes for Human Labour. London: 1836. [iv]

Gaskell, writing with a belief in the established order, presents a pretty damning
view of early paleotechnic industry, whose defects revolted him.

Gast, Paul: Unsere Neue Lebensform. Miinchen: 1932.

Geddes, Norman Bel: Horizons. Boston: 1932. [v, vii]

Suggestions of new forms for machines and utilities, with a full utilization of aero-
dynamic principles and modern materials. While it owes more to publicity than
scholarship, it is useful because of its illustrations.

Geddes, Patrick: An Analysis of the Principles of Economics. Edinburgh:
1885. [viii]

458 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Geddes, Patrick: The Classification of Statistics. Edinburgh: 1881.

Early papers by Geddes still suggestive to those capable of carrying Geddes’s clues
to their conclusion. The first sociological application of the modern concept of energy.
An Indian Pioneer of Science; the Life and Work of Sir Jagadis Bose.
London: 1920.

Cities in Evolution. London : 1915.

Geddes’s earlier essays distinguishing the paleotechnic from the neotechnic period
appear here.

Geddes, Patrick, and Thomson, J. A.: Life; Outlines of General Biology.
Two vols. New York: 1931.

Biology. New York: 1925.

The smaller book gives the skeleton of the larger work in dwarf form. The later
chapters in Volume II of Life are perhaps the best epitome of Geddes’s thought as
yet available. He projected a similar work in Sociology but did not live to com-
plete it.

Geddes, Patrick, and Slater, G. : Ideas at War. London: 1917. [ii, iv]

A brilliant enlarged sketch of Geddes’s smaller article on Wardom and Peacedom
that appeared in the Sociological Review.

Geer, William C. : The Reign of Rubber. New York: 1922. [v]

One of the few available books on a subject that calls for more extended and schol-
arly treatment than it has yet enjoyed,

Geitel, Max (Editor) : Der Siegeslauf der Technik. Three vols. Berlin: 1909.

George, Henry: Progress and Poverty. New York: 1879.

While George’s overemphasis of the role of the private appropriation of the rent of
land caused him to give a highly one-sided account of modern industrialism, his
work, like Marx’s, is a landmark in criticism.

Giese, Fritz: Bildungsideale im Maschinenzeitalter. Halle, a.S.: 1931.

Glanvill, Joseph: Scepsis Scientifica; or Confessed Ignorance the Way to
Science. London: 1665. [l]

Glauner, Karl, Th. : Industrial Engineering. Des Moines: 1931.

Gloag, John: Artifex, or The Future of Craftsmanship. New York: 1927.

Glockmeier, Georg: Von N aturalwirtschaft zum Millar dentribut: Ein Lang-
schnitt durch Technik, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft zweier Jahrtausende.
Zurich: 1931.

Goodyear, Charles: Gum Elastic and Its Varieties. 1853. [v]

Gordon, G. F. C.: Clockmaking, Past and Present; with which Is Incorpor-
ated the More Important Portions of Clocks, Watches and Bells^' by the
late Lord Grimthorpe. London: 1925. [r, iii]

Graham, J. J. : Elementary History of the Progress of the Art of War. Lon«
don: 1858. [ii]

Gras, N. S. B.: Industrial Evolution. Cambridge: 1930. [i-v]

A useful series of concrete studies of the development of industry.

An Introduction to Economic History. New York: 1922.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

459

Green, A. H., and others: Coal; Its History and Uses, London: 1878. [iv]

Grossmann, Robert: Die Technische Entwicklungen der Glasindustrie in
ihrer W irtschaftlichen Bedeutung, Leipzig: 1908. [ill]

Guerard, A. L.: ^ Short History of the International Language Movement.
London: 1922. [vi]

An excellent summary of the case for an international language and the status of the
movement a dozen years ago. Ogden’s work on Basic English, while valuable for its
suggestions in logic and grammar, has never presented an adequate defense for the
use of a living language for international intercourse.

Hale, W. J.: Chemistry Triumphant. Baltimore: 1933. [v]

Halevy, Elie: The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. London: 1928. [iv]
The best history of the ideology of the utilitarians.

Hammond, John Lawrence and Barbara: The Rise of Modern Industry. New
York: 1926. [iii, iv]

The Town Labourer. (1760-1832).

The Skilled Labourer (1760-1832). New York: 1919. [iv]

The Village Labourer. London: 1911. [m, iv]

This series of books, even the more general one on the rise of modern industry, is
based almost exclusively on British documentation. Within these limits it constitutes
the most vivid, massive, and unchallengable picture of the beginnings of the paleo-
technic regime and its proud progress that has been done. Cf. Engels, Mantoux, and
for contrast Ure. The pattern described by the Hammonds was followed, with minor
variations, in every other country.

Hamor, William A., and Weidlein, E, R.: Science in Action. New York: 1931.

Harris, L. S., and Butt, L N.: Scientific Research and Human Welfare.
New York: 1924. [v]

Harrison, H. S.: Pots and Pans. London: 1923. [ii]

The Evolution of the Domestic Arts. Second Edition. London: 1925.

Travel and Transport. London: 1925. [ll]

War and Chase. London: 1929. [ll]

An excellent series of introductions: but note particularly that on war and the chase.
Hatfield, H. Stafford: The Inventor and His World. New York: 1933.

Hauser, Henri: La Modernite du XVIe Siecle. Paris: 1930. [l]

Hausleiter, L.: The Machine Unchained. New York: 1933.

Worthless.

Hart, Ivor B.: The Mechanical Investigations of Leonardo da Vinci. London:
1925. [m]

With Feldhaus’s work on Leonardo an excellent summary of Leonardo’s achieve-
ments. See also the chapter in Usher.

The Great Engineers. London: 1928.

Havemeyer, Loomis: Conservation of Our Natural Resources (based on Van
Hise), New York: 1930. [v]

Recognition by the engineer of the facts on the waste and destruction of the environ-
ment first clearly put by George Perkins Marsh in the sixties.

460 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Henderson, Fred: Economic Consequences of Power Production, London:
1931. [v, viii]

Able and well-reasoned study of the tendencies to automatism and remote control in
neotechnic production.

Henderson, Lawrence J.: The Order of Nature, Cambridge: 1925. [i]

The Fitness of the Environment; An Inquiry into the Biological Signifi-
cance of the Properties of Matter, New York: 1927. [i, vili]

A brilliant and original contribution which reverses the usual treatment of adaptation.

Hendrick, B. J.: The Life of Andrew Carnegie. New York: 1932. [iv]

Hill, Leonard, and Campbell, Argyll: Health and Environment, London:
1925. [IV, v]

Valuable.

Hine, Lewis: Men at Work. New York: 1932. [v]

Photographs of modern workers on the job. The kind of study that should be done
systematically if Geddes’s Encyclopedia Graphica is ever to be done.

Hobson, John A.: The Evolution of Modern Capitalism; a Study of Ma-
chine Production. New Edition (Revised). London: 1926. [i-v]
Incentives in the New Industrial Order. London: 1922. [vili]

Wealth and Life; a Study in Values. London: 1929. [vm]

One of the most intelligent, clear-thinking and humane of the modern economists.
These books are a useful corrective to uncritical dreams of the “new capitalism” so
fashionable in America between 1925 and 1930.

Hocart, A. M.: The Progress of Man. London: 1933.

Brief critical survey of the various fields of anthropology, including technics.

Hoe, R. : A Short History of the Printing Press. New York: 1902.

Holland, Maurice, and Pringle, H. F.: Industrial Explorers, New York: 1928.

Hollandsche Molen: Eerste laarboekje, Amsterdam: 1927. [iii]

Report of the society for preserving the old mills of Holland.

Holsti, R.: Relation of War to tile Origin of the State. Helsingfors: 1913. [ll]
A book that challenges the complacent old-fashioned notion which made war a pe-
culiar property of savage peoples. Demonstrates the ritualistic nature of much primi-
tive warfare.

Holzer, Martin: Technih und Kapitalismus, Jena: 1932. [vm]

A keen criticism of technicism and pseudo-efSciency fostered by modern large scale
finance.

Hooke, Robert: Micrographia. London: 1665. [i]

Posthumous Works. London: 1705.

Hopkins, W. M.: The Outlook for Research and Invention, New York: 1919.

[v]

Hough, Walter: Fire as an Agent in Human Culture. Smithsonian Institution,
Bulletin 139. Washington: 1926. [ii]

Howard, Ebenezer: Tomorrow; A Peaceful Path to Reform. London: 1898.
Second Edition entitled: Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London: 1902. [v]

BIBLIOGRAPHY 461

A book which describes one of the most important neotechnic inventions, the garden-
city. See also Kropotkin and Geddes’s Cities in Evolution,

lies, George: Inventors at Work, New York: 1906.

Leading American Inventions, New York: 1912.

Jameson, Alexander (Editor) : A Dictionary of Mechanical Science^ Arts,
Manufactures and Miscellaneous Knowledge, London: 1827, [m, iv]

Jeffrey, E. C.: Coal and Civilization. New York: 1925. [iv, v]

Jevons, H. Stanley: Economic Equality in the Cooperative Commonwealth.
London: 1933. [viii]

Detailed suggestions for a typically English and orderly passage to communism.

Jevons, W. Stanley: The Coal Question. London: 1866. [iv]

A book which called attention to the fundamentally insecure basis of the paleotech-
nic economy.

Johannsen, Otto: Louis de Geer. Berlin: 1933. [iii]

Short account of a Belgian capitalist who waxed fat in the munitions industry in
seventeenth century Sweden. See also the account of Christopher Polhem in Usher.

Johnson, Philip: Machine Art. New York: 1934.

A study of the basic esthetic elements in machine forms.

Jones, Bassett: Debt and Production. New York: 1933. [vm]

An attempt to prove that the rate of industrial production is decreasing while the
structure of debt rises. An important thesis.

Kaempffert, Waldemar: A Popular History of American Invention. New
York: 1924. [iv, v]

Kapp, Ernst: Grundlinien einer Philosophic der Technik, Braunschweig:
1877.

Keir, R. M.: The Epic of Industry. New York: 1926. [iv, v]

Deals with the development of American industry. Well illustrated.

Kessler, Count Harry: Walter Rathenau: His Life and Work. New York:
1930. [v]

Sympathetic account of perhaps the leading neotechnic financier and industrialist:
a biographic appendix to Veblen’s theory of business enterprise showing the conflict
between pecuniary and technical standards in a single personality.

Kirby, Richard S., and Laurson, P. G.: The Early Years of Modern Civil
Engineering. New Haven: 1932. [iv]

Some interesting American material.

Klatt, Fritz: Die Geistige Wendung des Maschinenzeitalters. Potsdam: 1930.

Knight, Edward H.: Knighfs American Mechanical Dictionary. New York:
1875. [v]

A very creditable compilation, considering the time and place, which gives a useful
cross section of paleotechnic industry.

Koffka, Kurt: The Growth of the Mind. New York: 1925.

Kollmann, Franz: Schonheit der Technik. Miinchen: 1928. [vil]

462 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Good study with numerous photographs which already needs a supplement dealing
with later forms.

Kraft, Max: Das System der Technischen Arbeit. Four vols. Leipzig: 1902,

Krannhals, Paul: Das Organische Welthild. Two vols. Miinchen: 1928.
Der Weltsinn der Technik. Miinchen: 1932. [i]

Der Weltsinn is an attempt to form a critical philosophy of technics and relate it to
other aspects of life.

Kropotkin, P.: Fields, Factories and Workshops; or Industry Combined with
Agriculture and Brainwork with Manual Work, First Edition, 1898. Re-
vised Edition. London: 1919. [v, viii]

An early attempt to trace out the implications of the neotechnic economy, greatly re-
enforced by later developments in electricity and factory production. See Howard.
Mutual Aid, London: 1904.

Kulischer, A. M., and Y. M. : Kriegs und Wanderzilge; W eltgeschichte als
V olkerbewegung, Berlin: 1932. [ll, iv]

Able analysis of the relation between war and the migrations of peoples.

Labarte: Histoire des Arts Industrielles au Moyen Age et a UEpoque de la
Renaissance, Three vols. Paris: 1872-1875.

Does not live up to the promise of its title. See Boissonade and Renard.

Lacroix, Paul: Military and Religious Life in the Middle Ages and . . .
the Renaissance, London: 1874. [ii]

Landauer, Carl: Planwirtschaft und Verkehrswirtschaft, Mxinchen: 1931.

Langley, S. P.: Langley Memoir on Mechanical Flight, Part 1. 1887-1896.
Washington: 1911. [v]

Launay, Louis de: La Technique Industrielle, Paris: 1930.

Laurson, P. G., and Kirby, R. S.: The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineer^
ing. New Haven: 1932. [iv]

Le Corbusier: VArt Decoratif d^ Aujourdui. Paris: 1925.

Vers Une Architecture, Paris: 1922. Translated. London: 1927. [vii]
Following the work of Sullivan and Wright and Loos more than a generation later,
Le Corbusier re-discovered the machine for himself and is perhaps the chief polemical
advocate of machine forms.

Lee, Gerald Stanley: The Voice of the Machines; An Introduction to the
Twentieth Century, Northampton: 1906.

A sentimental book.

Leith, C. K.: World Minerals and World Politics, New York: 1931. [v]

Lenard, Philipp: Great Men of Science; A History of Human Progress,

■ London : 1933.

Leonard, J. N.: Loki; The Life of Charles P, Steinmetz. New York: 1929. [v]

Le Play, Frederic: Les Ouvriers Europeans, Six vols. Second Edition. Tours:
1879. [n]

463

BIBLIOGRAPHY

One of the great landmarks of modern sociology: the failure to follow it up reveals
the limitations of the major schools of economists and anthropologists. The lack of
such concrete studies of work and worker and working environment is a serious hand-
icap in writing a history of technics or appraising current forces.

Leplay House: Coal: Ways to Reconstruction. London: 1926. [v]

Application of neotechnic thought to a backward industry.

Levy, H.: The Universe of Science. London: 1932.

Good introduction, [i, v]

Lewis, Gilbert Newton: The Anatomy of Science. New Haven: 1926. [i, v]
Excellent exposition of the contemporary approach to science: see also Poincare,
Henderson, Levy, and Bavink.

Lewis, Wyndhana: Time and Western Man. New York: 1928. [i]

Critical tirade against time-keeping and all the timed-arts by an eye-minded advocate
of the spatial arts. One-sided but not altogether negligible.

Liehburg, Max Eduard: Das Deue Weltbild. Zurich: 1932.

Lilje, Hanns: Das Technische Zeitalter. Berlin: 1932.

Lindner, Werner, and Steinmetz, G.: Die Ingenieurbauten in Ihrer Guten
Gestaltung. Berlin: 1923. [vii]

Particularly good in its relation of older forms of industrial construction to modern
works: plenty of illustrations. See Le Corbusier and Kollmann.

Lombroso, Ferrero Gina: The Tragedies of Progress. New York: 1931.

(See Ferrero.)

Lucke, Charles E. : Power. New York: 1911.

Lux, J. A.: Ingenieur-Aesthetih. Miinchen: 1910. [vii]

One of the early studies. See Lindner.

MacCurdy, G. G.: Human Origins. London: 1923. New York: 1924. [i, ii]

Good factual account of tools and weapons in prehistoric cultures.

Maciver, R. M.: Society: Its Structure and Changes. New York: 1932.

Well-balanced and penetrating introduction.

Mackaye, Benton: The New Exploration. New York: 1928. [v, viii]

Pioneer treatise on geotechnics and regional planning to be put alongside Marsh
and Howard.

Mackenzie, Catherine; Alexander Graham Bell. New York: 1928. [v]

Male, Emile: Religious Art in France^ XIII Century. Translated from Third
Edition. New York: 1913. [i]

Malthus, T. R.: An Essay on Population. Two vols. London: 1914. [iv]
Man, Henri de: Joy in Work. London: 1929. [vi]

A factual study of the psychological rewards of work, based however upon very
limited observation and an insufficient number of cases. Any useful observations on
the subject await studies in the fashion of Terpenning’s work on the Village. See
Le Play.

Manley, Charles M.: Langley Memoir on Mechanical Flight. Part II. Wash-
ington: 1911. [v]

464

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Mannheim, Karl: Ideologic und U to pie. Bonn: 1929.

A very suggestive if difficult work.

Mantoux, Paul: La Revolution Industrielle du XV II I e Siecle. Paris: 1906.
Translated.

Industrial Revolution. First Edition. Paris: 1905. Translated. New York:
1928. [iv]

Deals with the technical and industrial changes in eighteenth century England, and
is perhaps the best single book on the subject that has so far been produced,

Marey, Etienne Jules: Animal Mechanism; A Treatise on Terrestrial and
Aerial Locomotion. New York: 1874. [v]

Movement. New York: 1895.

Important physiological studies which were destined to stimulate a renewed interest
in flight. See Pettigrew.

Marot: Helen: The Creative Impulse in Industry. New York: 1918. [viil]
Appraisal of potential educational values in modern industrial organizations. Still
full of pertinent criticism and suggestion.

Martin, T. C., and Dyer, F. L.: Edison: His Life and Inventions. New York:
1910. [v]

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich: Manifesto of the Communist Party. New
York.

Capital. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Two vols. London: 1930.
A classic work whose historic documentation, sociological insight, and honest human
passion outweigh the defects of its abstract economic analysis. The first adequate
interpretation of modern society in terms of its technics.

Mason, Otis T.: The Origins of Invention; A Study of Industry Among Prim-
itive Peoples. New York: 1895. [i, ii]

A good book in its time that now cries for a worthy successor.

Matare, Franz: Die ArbeitsmitteL Maschine^ A p par at, Werhzeug. Leipzig:
1913. [i, v]

Important. Emphasizes the role of the apparatus and the utility and demonstrates the
neotechnic tendencies of the advanced chemical industries as regards scientific or-
ganization, the proportionately higher number of technicians, and the increasing
automatism of the work.

Matschoss, Conrad (Editor) : Manner der Technik. Berlin: 1925.

Series of biographies, criticized by Feldhaus for various omissions and errors.

Matschoss: Conrad: Die Entwicklung der Dampfmaschine; eine Geschichte
der Ortsfesten Dampfmaschine und der Lokomohile, der Schiffsmaschine
und Lokomotive. Two vols. Berlin: 1908. [iv]

An exhaustive study of the steam engine. For a shorter account see Thurston.
Technische Kulturdenkmdler. Berlin: 1927.

Mayhew, Charles: London Labor and the London Poor. Four vols. London:
1861.

Mayo, Elton: The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York:
1933. [v]

Useful study of the relation of efficiency to rest-periods and interest in work. See
Henri de Man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 465

McCartney, Eugene S.: Warfare by Land and Sea. (Our Debt to Greece and
Rome Series.) Boston: 1923. [ii]

McCurdy, Edward: Leonardo da Vincfs Notebooks. New York: 1923. [i, iii]
The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci. New York: 1928. [i, in]

Meisner, Erich: Weltanschauung Lines Technikers. Berlin: 1927.

Meyer, Alfred Gotthold: Eisenbauten — Ihre Geschichte und Esthetik. Esslin-
gen a.N. : 1907. [iv, v, vii]

Very important: an able critical and historical work.

Middle West Utilities Company: Americans New Frontier. Chicago: 1929. [v]
Despite its origin, a very useful study of the relation of electricity to industrial and
urban decentralization.

Milham, Willis I.: Time and Time-Keepers. New York: 1923. [i, iix, iv]

Moholy-Nagy, L.: The New Vision (translated by Daphne Hoffman). New
York. (Undated.) [vii]

Malerei Fotografie Film. Miinchen: 1927. [vii]

While it does not live up to the promise of its early chapters, The New Vision is
still one of the best presentations of modern experiments in form initiated at the
Bauhaus in Dessau under Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. Even the failures and blind
alleys in these experiments do not lack interest — ^if only because those who are new
to the subject tend to repeat them.

Morgan, C. Lloyd: Emergent Evolution. New York: 1923.

Mory, L. V. H., and Redman, L. V.: The Romance of Research. Baltimore:
1933.

Mumford, Lewis: The Story of Utopias. New York: 1922. [vi, viii]

Summary of the classic utopias which, while often superficial, sometimes open up a
neglected trail.

Neuburger, Albert: The Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients. New
York: 1930.

Voluminous. But see Feldhaus.

Neudeck, G.: Geschichte der Technik. Stuttgart: 1923.

Sometimes useful for historical facts. Comprehensive but not first-rate.

Nummenhoff, Ernst: Der Handwerker in der Deutschen Vergangenheit. Jena:
1924.

Profusely illustrated.

Nussbaum, Frederick L.: A History of the Economic Institutions of Modern
Europe. New York: 1933.

A condensation of Sombart.

Obermeyer, Henry: Stop That Smoke! New York: 1933. [iv, v]

Popular account of the cost and extent of the paleotechnic smoke-pall which hangs
heavy over our manufacturing centers even today.

Ogburn, W. F.: Living with Machines. New York: 1933. [iv, v]

Social Change. New York: 1922.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose: The Revolt of the Masses. New York: 1933 [vi]

466

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Ostwald, Wilhelm: Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaften. Leip-
zig: 1909.

See Geddes’s The Classification of Statistics, written a generation earlier.

Ozenfant, Amedee: Foundations of Modern Art, New York: 1931. [vii]
Uneven, but sometimes penetrating.

Pacoret, Etienne: Le Machinisme Vniversel; Ancien, Moderns et Contempo*
rain, Paris: 1925.

One of tbe most useful introductions in French.

Parrish, Wayne William: An Outline of Technocracy, New York: 1933.
Pasdermadjian, H.: U Organisation Scientifique du Travail. Geneva: 1932.
Pasquet, D. : Londres et Les Ouvriers de' Londres, Paris : 1914.

Passmore, J. B., and Spencer, A. J.: Agricultural Implements and Machinery,
[ill, iv]. A Handbook of the Collections in the Science Museum, London,
London: 1930.

Useful.

Paulhan, Frederic: Psychologic de P Invention, Paris: 1901.

Wisely deals with mechanical invention, not as a special gift of nature, but as a par-
ticular variety of a more general human trait common to all the arts.

Peake, Harold J. E.: Early Steps in Human Progress, London: 1933. [i, ii]
Good; but see Renard.

Peake, Harold, and Fleure, H. J.: The Corridors of Time, Eight vols. Oxford:
1927.

Peligot, Eugene M.: Le Verre; Son Histoire, sa Fabrication, Paris; 1877.
[in]

Penty, Arthur: Post-Industrialism. London: 1922. [vi]

Criticism of modern finance and the machine and prediction of the downfall of the
system at a time when this position was far less popular than at present.

Petrie, W. F.: The Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt. Second Edition. Lon-
don: 1910. [l, ii]

The Revolutions of Civilization. London: 1911. [iii]

Pettigrew, J. Bell: Animal Locomotion; or Walking, Swimming and Flying;
with a Dissertatidn on Aeronautics, New York: 1874. [v]

Important contribution. See Marey.

Poincare, Henri: Science and Method. London: 1914.

A classic in the philosophy of science.

Polakov, Walter N.: The Power Age; Its Quest and Challenge, New York:

1933. [v, vin]

Excellent presentation of the implication of the new forms of utilizing electric power
and organizing modern industry. Unfortunate in its assumption that the use of power
is the distinguishing feature of neotechnic industry,

Popp, Josef; Die Technik Als Kultur Problem. Miinchen: 1929.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 467

Poppe, Johann H. M. von: Geschichte Alter Erfindungen und Entdeckungen
im Bereiche der Gewerbe, Kilnste und Wissenschaften, Stuttgart: 1837.
[m]

Beckmann s nearest successor : containing some facts that have been dropt by the
roadside since.

Porta, Giovanni Battista della: Natural Magick, London: 1658. [in]

English translation of a sixteenth century classic.

Porter, George R.: Progress of the Nation. Three vols. in one. London: 1836-
1843. [iv]

Useful as documentation.

Pound, A.: Iron Man in Industry, Boston: 1922. [v]

Discussion of automatism in industry and the need to compensate for it.

Pupin, Michael J.: Romance of the Machine, New York: 1930.

Trivial.

Rathenau, Walter: The New Society. New York: 1921. [v, viii]

In Days to Come. London: 1921. [viii]

Die Neue Wirtschaft. Berlin: 1919. [viii]

Aware of the dangers of iron-bound mechanization, Rathenau, though sometimes a
little shrill and almost hysterical, wrote a series of sound criticisms of the existing
order; and In Bays to Come and The New Society he outlined a new industrial
society. He dijQfered from many social democrats and communists in recognizing the
critical importance of the moral and educational problems involved in the new
orientation.

Read, T. T.: Our Mineral Civilization. New York: 1932.

Recent Social Trends in the United States. Two vols. New York: 1933.
Recent Economic Changes in the United States. Two vols. New York: 1929.

[iv,v]

An inquiry, still useful for its data, which would have been even more important had
its facts been mustered in such a fashion as to point more clearly to its properly
dubious and pessimistic conclusion.

Recueil de Planches^ sur les Science, les Art Liberaux, et les Art Mechanique.
(Supplement to Diderot’s Encyclopedia) . Paris: 1763. [iii]

See Encyclopedie.

Redman, L. V., and Mory, L. V. H.: The Romance of Research. Baltimore:
1933.

Redzich, Constantin: Das Grosse Buch der Erfindungen und deren Er finder.
Two vols. Leipzig: 1928.

Renard, George F.: Guilds in the Middle Ages. London: 1919. [iii]

Life and Work in Primitive Times. New York: 1929. [ii]

Penetrating and suggestive study of a subject whose scant materials require an active
yet prudent imagination.

Renard, George F., and Dulac, A. : U Evolution Industrielle et Agricole depuis
Cent Cinquante Ans. Paris : 1912. [iv, v]

A standard work.

468 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Renard, George F., and Weulersse, G.: Life and Work in Modern Europe;
Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries- London: 1926. [ill]

Excellent.

Reuleaux, Franz: The Kinematics of Machinery; Outlines of a Theory of
Machines. London: 1876.

The most important systematic morphology of machines: a book so good that it has
discouraged rivals.

Richards, Charles R.: The Industrial Museum. New York: 1925.

Critical survey of existing types of industrial museum.

Rickard, Thomas A.: Man and Metals; A History of Mining in Relation to
the Development of Civilization. Two vols. New York: 1932. [ii-v]
Compendious and fairly exhaustive.

Riedler, A.: Das Maschinen-Zeichnen. Second Edition. Berlin: 1913.

An influential treatise in Germany.

Robertson, J. Drummond: The Evolution of Clockwork; with a Special Sec-
tion on the Clocks of Japan. London: 1931.

Recent data on a subject whose early history has many pitfalls. See Usher.

Roe, Joseph W.: English and American Tool Builders. New Haven: 1916.
[iv]

Valuable, See Smiles.

Rossman, Joseph: The Psychology of the Inventor. New York: 1932.

Routledge, Robert: Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century.
London: 1899. [iv]

Rugg, Harold 0.: The Great Technology; Social Chaos and the Public
Mind. New York: 1933. [v, viii]

Concerned with the educational problem of realizing the values of modern industry
and of controlling the machine.

Russell, George W.: The National Being. New York: 1916.

Salter, Arthur: Modern Mechanization. New York: 1933.

Sarton, George: Introduction to the History of Science. Three Vols. Balti-
more: 1927-1931. [i]

The life-work of a devoted scholar.

Sayce, R. U.: Primitive Arts and Crafts; An Introduction to the Study of
Material Culture. New York: 1933. [ii]

Suggestive.

Schmidt, Robert: Das Glas. Berlin: 1922. [iii]

Schmitthenner, Paul: Krieg und Kriegfuhrung im Wandel der Weltgeschichte.
Potsdam: 1930. [ii, ill, iv]

Well illustrated with an excellent bibliography.

Schneider, Hermann: The History of World Civilization from Prehistoric
Times to the Middle Ages. Volume I, New York: 1931.

469

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schregardus, J., Visser, Door C., and Ten Bruggencate, A.: Onze Hollandsche
Molen. Amsterdam: 1926.

Well illustrated.

Schulz, Hans: Die Geschichte der Glaser zeugung, Leipzig: 1928. [ill]

Das Glas, Miinchen: 1923. [iii]

Schumacher, Fritz: Schopferwille und Mechanisierung, Haniburg: 1933.

Der Finch der Technik. Hamburg: 1932.

Says more in a few pages than many more pretentious treatises succeed in doing in
a tome. Schumacher’s humane and rational mind compares with Spengler’s as his
admirable schools and communities in Hamburg compare with the decayed esthetic
obscurantism of the Bottcherstrasse in Bremen. It is important to recognize that both
strains are characteristic of German thought, although at the moment that repre-
sented by Schumacher is in eclipse.

Schuyler, Hamilton: The Roeblings; A Century of Engineers, Bridge-Build’-
ers and Industrialists. Princeton: 1931. [iv]

More important for its subject than for what the author has added to it.

Schwarz, Heinrich: David Octavius Hill; Master of Photography. New York:
1931. [v, vii]

Good. '

Schwarz, Rudolph: Wegweisung der Technik. Potsdam. (No date.) [vil]
Some interesting comparisons between the strong north gothic of Lubeck and modern
machine-forms. Note also that this holds with the bastides of Southern France.

Science at the Crossroads. Papers presented to the International Congress of
the History of Science and Technology by the delegates of the U.S.S.R.
London: 1931.

Suggestive, if often teasingly obscure papers, on communism and Marxism and mod-
ern science.

Scott, Howard: Introduction to Technocracy. New York: 1933.

A book whose political callowness, historical ignorance and factual carelessness did
much to discredit the legitimate conclusions of the so-called technocrats.

Soule, George: A Planned Society. New York: 1932. [viii]

Sheard, Charles: Life-giving Light. New York: 1933. [v]

One of the better books in the very uneven Century of Progress Series.

Singer, Charles: From Magic to Science. New York: 1928. [i]

A Short History of Medicine. New York: 1928.

Slosson, E. E.: Creative Chemistry. New York: 1920. [v]

Smiles, Samuel: Industrial Biography; Iron Workers and Toolmakers. Lon-
don: 1863. [iv]

Lives of the Engineers. Four vols. London: 1862-1866. Five vols. London:
1874. New vols. London: 1895. [iv]

Men of Invention and Industry. 1885. [rv]

Smiles, perhaps better known for his complacently Victorian moralizings on self-help
and success, was a pioneer in the field of industrial biography; and his studies, which
were often close to their sources, are important contributions to the history of tech-

470

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

nics. His accounts of Maudslay, Bramah and their followers make one wish that
people of his particular hent and industry had appeared more often.

Smith, Adam: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Na~
tions. Two vols. London: 1776. [iii]

A cross-section of the late eotechnic economy, as the division of the process was
reducing the worker to a mere cog in the mechanism. See the Encyclopedie for
pictures.

Smith, Preserved: A History of Modern Culture, Vol. 1. New York: 1930.
[in]

Excellent discussion of every subject but technics.

Soddy, Frederick: Wealthy Virtual Wealth and Debt, London: 1926. Second
Edition, Revised. New York: 1933. [viii]

The application of energetics to finance.

Sonxbart, Werner: Gewerbewesen, Two vols. Berlin: 1929.

The Quintessence of Capitalism, New York: 1915.

Krieg und Kapitalismus, Miincheh: 1913. [ii, m, iv]

Invaluable study of the social, technical and financial relations between war and
capitalism, with particular emphasis on the important changes that took place in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Luxus und Kapitalismus, Miinchen: 1913. [ii, ill]

Penetrating social and economic account of the role of the court and the courtesan
and the cult of luxury developed during the Renascence.

Der Moderne Kapitalismus, Four vols. Miinchen: 1927. [i-v]

A work conceived and carried out on a colossal scale. It parallels the present history
of technics, as the Mississippi might be said to parallel the railway train that occa-
sionally approaches its hanks. "While sometimes Sombart’s generalizations seem to
me too neat and confident — as in the change from the organic to the inorganic as
the increasing mark of modern technics — ^I have differed from his weighty scholarship
only when no other course was open.

Spencer, A. J,, and Passmore, J. B.: Agricultural Implements and Machinery,
A Handbook of the Collections in the Science Museum, London, London:
1930.

Spengler, Oswald: The Decline of the West, Two vols. New York: 1928.
While Spengler makes many generalizations about technics this is one department
where this sometimes penetrating and original (but crotchety) thinker is particularly
unreliable. In typical nineteenth century fashion he dismisses the technical achieve-
ments of other cultures and gives a fake air of uniqueness to the early Faustian in-
ventions, which borrowed heavily from the more advanced Arabs and Chinese. Partly
his errors derive from his theory of the absolute isolation of cultures: a counterpart
curiously to the unconscious imperialism of the British theory of absolute diffusion
from a single source.

Man and Technics. New York: 1932.

A book heavily burdened by a rancid mysticism, tracing back to the weaker sides
of Wagner and Nietzsche.

Stenger, Erich: Geschichte der Photographic, Berlin: 1929. [v]

Useful summary.

Stevers, Martin: Steel Trails; The Epic of the Railroads. New York: 1933.

[IV]

Popular, but not without technical interest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 471

Strada, Jacobus de: Kunstlicher Abriss Allerhand Wasser, Wind, Ross und
Handmiihlen, Frankfurt: 1617. [iii]

Survey Graphic: Regional Planning Number. May, 1925. [v]

Predicted the breakdown of the present metropolitan economy and sketched outlines
of a neotechnic regionalism,

Sutherland, George: Twentieth Century Inventions; A Forecast, New York:
1901.

Taussig, F. E.: Inventors and Moneymakers, New York: 1915.

Over-rated.

Tawney, R. H.: Equality, New York: 1931.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, New York: 1927. [l]

The Acquisitive Society, New York: 1920.

The work of an able economist and a humane mind.

Taylor, Frederic W.: The Principles of Scientific Management, New York:
1911. [v]

One of those classics whose reputation is incomprehensible without a direct acquaint-
ance with the personality behind it.

Taylor Society (Person, H. S., Editor) : Scientific Management in American
Industry, New York; 1929. [v]

Survey of more recent applications of Taylor’s and Gantt’s principles.

Thompson, Holland: The Age of Invention, New Haven: 1921. [iv, v]

The story of technics in America. Readable but not exhaustive. See Kaemffert.

Thomson, J. A., and Geddes, Patrick: Life; Outlines of General Biology, New
York: 1931.

Biology, New York: 1925.

See Geddes.

Thorndike, Lynn : A History of Magic and Experimental Science During the
First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era, Two vols. New York: 1923. [l, ill]
Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century, New York: 1929. [i, in]
Both invaluable.

Thorpe, T. E. (Editor), Green, Miall and others: Coal; Its History and Uses,
London: 1878. [iv]

Thurston, R. H. : .4 History of the Growth of the Steam Engine, First Edition.
1878. Fourth Edition. 190k [iv]

Very good.

Tilden, W. A.: Chemical Discovery and Invention in the Twentieth Century,
London; 1916. [v]

Tilgher, Adriano: Work; What Is Has Meant to Men Through the Middle
Ages. New York: 1930.

A disappointing work.

Tomlinson" s Encyclopedia of the Useful Arts, Two vols. London; 1854.

Traill, Henry D.: Social England, Six vols. London: 1909.

Well-illustrated background.

472

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Tryon, F. G., and Eckel, E. C.: Mineral Economics, New York: 1932. [v]
Useful.

Tugwell, Rexford Guy: Industry's Coming of Age, New York: 1927.

A little glib and over-sanguine about the prospects of a transformation of industry
under existing leadership.

Unwin, George: Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, Oxford: 1904.

Updike, D. B.: Printing Types; Their History, Forms and Use. Two vols.
Caniridge: 1922. [ill]

Important.

Ure, Andrew: The Philosophy of Manufactures; or An Exposition of the
Scientific, Moral and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of
Great Britain. First Edition. London: 1835. [iv]. Third Edition. London:
1861.

Perhaps the chief example of paleotechnic apologetics in which the author uncon-
sciously hangs himself by his own rope.

Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines. Seventh Edition. Edited by
Robert Hunt and F. W. Hudler. London: 1875.

Usher, Abbott Payson: A History of Mechanical Inventions. New York:
1929. [I-V]

See Introduction.

Van Loon, Hendrick: Man the Miracle Maher. New York: 1928.

The Fall of the Dutch Republic. New York: 1913. [ill]

Some useful data on trade and transportation in Holland.

Veblen, Thorstein: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the In*
dustrial Arts. New York: 1914.

Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: 1915.

The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: 1905.

The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: 1899.

The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. New York: 1919.

The Engineers and the Price System. New York: 1921. [v, viii]

An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation,
New York: 1917.

After Marx, Veblen shares with Somhart the distinction of being perhaps the foremost
sociological economist. His various works, taken together, form a unique contribution
to the theory of modern technics. Perhaps the most important from the standpoint of
technics are The Theory of Business Enterprise and Imperial Germany and the
Industrial Revolution: hut there are valuable sections in The Theory of the Leisure
Class and in The Instinct of W orkmanship. While a believer in rationalized industry,
Veblen did not regard adaptation as the passive adjustment of an organism to an
inflexible physical and mechanical environment.

Vegetius, Renatus Flavius: Military Institutions. London: 1767. [ll]
Eighteenth century translation of a fifteenth century classic.

Verantius, Faustus: Machinae Novae. Venice: 1595. [iii]

Vierendeel, A.: Esquisse dFune Histoire de la Technique. Brussels: 1921.

473

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Von Dyck, W. : Wege und Ziele des Deutschen Museums, Berlin: 1929.

Voskuil, Walter H. : Minerals in Modern Industry, New York: 1930. [v]

The Economics of Water Power Development. New York: 1928. [v]

Good summary.

Vowles, Hugh P., and Margaret W.: The Quest for Power; from Prehistoric
Times to the Present Day. London: 1931. [i-v]

A valuable study of the various forms of prime-mover.

Warshaw, H. T. : Representative Industries in the United States. New York:
1928.

Wasmuth, Ewald: Kritik des Mechanisierten Weltbildes. Hellerau: 1929.

Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice: A History of Trades Unionism. First Edition.
London: 1894.

Industrial Democracy. Two vols. London : 1897.

Classic accounts with special reference to England.

Weber, Max: General Economic History. New York: 1927.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: 1930. [l]

Weinreich, Hermann: Bildungswerte der Technik. Berlin: 1928.

Useful mainly for bibliography.

Wells, David L.: Recent Economic Changes. New York: 1886.

Compare with the similar volume of 1929.

Wells, H. G.: Anticipation of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific
Progress. London: 1902.

The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. Two vols. New York:
1931. [v]

Wendt, Ulrich: Die Technik als Kulturmacht. Berlin: 1906.

One of the best historical commentaries on technics.

Westcott, G. F.: Pumping Machinery. A Handbook of the Science Museum.
London: 1932. [iii, iv]

Whitehead, Alfred North: Science and the Modern World. New York: 1925.
The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: 1926.

Adventures of Ideas. New York: 1933.

Whitney, Charles S.: Bridges: A Study in Their Art, Science and Evolution.
New York: 1929.

World Economic Planning; The Necessity for Planned Adjustment of Pro-
ductive Capacity and Standards of Living. The Hague: 1932. [v, Vlli]
Exhaustive introduction to the subject, from almost every possible angle.

Worringer, Wilhelm: Form in Gothic. London: 1927.

Interesting, if not always substantiated: has a bearing on form in general.

Zimmer, George F. : The Engineering of Antiquity. London : 1913.

Zimmerman, Erich W.: World Resources and Industries; An Appraisal of
Agricultural and Industrial Resources. New York: 1933. [iv, v]

Very useful; with an adequate bibliography.

474 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

Zimmern, Alfred: The Greek Commonwealth, Oxford: 1911. [ii]
Nationality and Government, London: 1918. [vi]

Zonca, Vittorio: Novo Teatro di Machine et Edifici. Padua: 1607. [ni]
Zschimmer, Eberhard: Philosophic der Technik, Jena: 1919.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My principal debt, throughout this study, has been to my master, the late
Patrick Geddes. His published writings do but faint justice to the magnitude
and range and originality of his mind; for he was one of the outstanding
thinkers of his generation, not alone in Great Britain, but in the world. From
Geddes’s earliest papers on The Classification of Statistics to his latest chap-
ters in the two volume study of Life, written with J. Arthur Thomson, he was
steadily interested in technics and economics as elements in that synthesis
of thought and that doctrine of life and action for which he laid the founda-
tions. Geddes’s unpublished papers are now being collected and edited at
the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, Only second to the profound debt I owe
Geddes is that which I must acknowledge to two other men: Victor Branford
and Thorstein Veblen. With all three I had the privilege of personal contact ;
and for those who can no longer have that opportunity I have included in
the bibliography a fairly full list of their works, including some which do
not bear directly upon the subject in hand.

In the preparation of Technics and Civilization I am indebted to the help-
ful interest and aid of the following men: Mr. Thomas Beer, Dr.-Ing. Walter
Curt Behrendt, Mr. M. D. C. Crawford, Dr. Oskar von Miller, Professor
R. M. Maciver, Dr. Henry A. Murray, Jr., Professor Charles R. Richards,
and Dr. H. W. Van Loon. For the criticism of certain chapters of the manu-
script I must give my warm thanks to Mr, J. G. Fletcher, Mr. J.‘ E. Spingarn
and Mr. C. L. Weis. For vigilant and searching criticism of the book in one
draft or another, by Miss Catherine K. Bauer, Professor Geroid Tanquary
Robinson, Mr. James L. Henderson, and Mr. John Tucker, Jr., I am under
an obligation that would be almost unbearable were friendship not willing
to underwrite it. For aid in gathering historical illustrations I am particu-
larly obliged to Mr. William M. Ivins and his assistants at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Finally, I must give my cordial thanks to the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation for the partial fellowship in 1932 that enabled me
to spend four months in research and meditation in Europe — ^not less because
those fruitful months altered the scope and scale of the entire work. L. M.

475

INDEX

Absalon of St. Victor, 30
Absolute, desire for, 42
Abstraction, 50
promoted by paper, 136
Accademia Lynxei, 57
Accademia Secretorum Naturae, 138
Acceleration, 22, 198
Accuracy, mathematical, 247
Acedia, 271

Acquisitive life, beginnings of in Rena-
scence, 98
Adams, Henry, 432
Addled subjectivity, 273
Ader, 32
Adjustment, 316
Administration, units of, 225
Adulterants, 179
Adventures of Ideas, 368
Agricola, 170
Agriculture, Chinese, 262
industrialization of, 259
and industry, balance between, 123
neotechnic, 258
rationalization of, 381
rewards of, 67
Air-brake, 199
Airplane, 231, 266
social effects of, 236
travel, 239
Albert, Prince, 204
Alexander, 342
Al-Jazari, 14
Alternator, 221

477

Aluminum, 229, 230
Amateur, 410, 415
Ampere, 214
Amplifier, 234
Amsterdam, 122, 404
Amusement business, 315
Ancient world, technics of, 12
Andersen, Hans, 326, 358
Anesthesia, psychal, 300
Animism, 31

Antipater of Thessalonica, 113
Antiquarianism, 312
Apparatus, 11
conceptual, 370
Archaicisms, 317
Archimedes, 86
Aristotle, 279

Arkwright, Richard, 134, 173
Armament industry, as inciter of
war, 165
Army, 93

as source of standardized produce
tion, 90
industrial, 174
social organization of, 91
Art, African, 299
and machine, 330
cubist, 335

paleotechnic absence of, 203
socialization of, 409
source of, 333

Artist, paleotechnic role of, 204
Asbestos, 232

478

INDEX

Ashmole, Elias, 30
Ashton, 91

Assemblage, straight line, 228
Association, 412
Atget, 340

Atlantis, The New, 56
Austin, 191
Automata, 41
playful, 101
Automatism, 227, 279
Automaton, 410

Automobile, social effects of, 236
Ax, 62

Babbage, 274, 387

Back to Methuselah, 428

Bacon, Francis, 30, 55, 70

Bacon, Roger, 18, 30, 35, 38, 58, 126

Bacteriologist, 246

Baekeland, 218

Bakelite, 229

Ballad, 201

Balloon, dirigible, 86

Balzac, 204

Banco, Andrea, 21

Barbarian, threat of, 302

Barbarism, lapse into, 154

Barbizon School, 200

Barnett, 227

Baroque dream, 100

Basic Communism, 400, 403, 405

Bata Shoe Factories, 430

Bauer, Catherine K., 475

Bauer, Dr. Georg (Agricola), 70, 115

Bauxite, 230

Beer, Thomas, 475

Beethoven, 203

Behrendt, Dr. Walter Curt, 475
Belgium, 169, 259
Bell, Alexander Graham, 251
Bell, A. M., 252
Bell Laboratories, 218
Bell Telephone Company, 417
Bellamy, Edward, 89, 190, 403
Benedictine rule, 13
Bentham, Samuel, 90

Bent-wood, 111
Benzine, 214
Bergson, 243, 342
Bessemer, Henry, 164
Bessemer process, 91
Biography, introspective, 130
Biology, Influence of, 250
Biotechnic period, 353
Birth-rate, fall of, 260
Biscuits, ship’s, 123
“Bitch-Goddess,” 303
Black Country, 163
Blake, Dr. C. J., 252
Blake, William, 288, 309
Blast furnace, 87
and watermill, 115
Bleriot, 236
Blood and Iron, 163
Bloodlust, 304
Boats, 120

Body, respect for, 35
Boilers, firing of, 227
Bolometer, Langley’s, 254
Bom, Gilles de, 22
Bonanza farm, 162
Book-keeping, 23
Booth, Charles, 397
Borelli, 250

Boring machine, 160, 161
Botticelli, 19

Bottle-making machine, Owens, 228
Boulton, Matthew, 100
Bounderby, 169

Bourgeois civilization, devaluation of,
353

Bourgeoisie, routine of, 42
the new, 187

Bracelle, Jean Baptiste, 335
Brahms, 203
Bramah, Joseph, 209
Brancusi, 336
Branford, Victor, 273, 475
Braque, 336

Bridge, Firth of Forth, 207
Bridges, 207
Briggs, 121

INDEX

479

Bright, John, 186
Brooklyn Bridge, 207, 209
Browning, 204
Brummagem, 100
Brunei, M. I., 210
Brutality, exhibitions of, 305
Buckingham, J. S., 164
Buecher, Karl, 179, 344
Burdin, 214

Bureau of Standards, National, 265
Butler, Samuel, 245, 284, 301, 328

Cabet, Etienne, 89, 190
Calculating machine, 210
Calcutta, 233

California Institute of Technology, 220

Calory diet, replacement of, 254

Camera, 243, 337

Camera-eye, 243

Canals, 122

Cannon, 84

Capitalism, 323, 367, 373, 377, 390, 396,
397, 405, 422, 431
and technics, distinction between, 26
carboniferous, 156
effect on machine, 27
modern, 74
relation to mining, 74
Capitalist production, paradox of, 397
weakness of, 93

Capitalist system, moral bankruptcy
of, 419

Capitalistic enterprise, formula of, 390
preparation for, 103
Capitalistic sabotage, 406
Carboniferous capitalism, results of, 158
Cardan, 138, 159
Carlyle, 103, 204, 289, 390
Carnegie, 177
Carnot, 218
Carriage, steam, 163
Carter, 134

Cartography, medieval, 19
Cartwright, 144
Caste-monopoly, 407
Castes, occupational, 64

Catapults, as used by Romans, 86
Causality, 318
Cellini, 212
Celluloid, 229

Central power station, 221, 223
Cerium, 232
Chanel, 354

Change, conceptual, 371
itch for, 314

Changes in the United States, Recent
Economic, 393
Chaplin, Charlie, 341
Chase, Stuart, 275, 360
Chateaubriand, 204
Chaucer, 19
Chemical warfare, 310
Chemistry, colloidal, 234
debt to, 234
Chevreul, 201
Child labor, 153, 174
China, 134
Christianopolis, 58
Chromium, 231

Church, contribution to machine by, 35
Circuses, 303
Cities, 65
areas of, 163
Civilization, 60
Clair, Rene, 341
Class and nation, 187
Class struggle, 189, 213
Classes, kept, 228
Clavichord, 202
Cleanliness, eotechnic, 149
surgical, 247

Clerk-Maxwell, 218, 245, 369
Clermont, 207
Clipper ship. 111
Clock, as key-machine, 14
as model, 15
as power-machinery, 15
mechanical, 14
water, 13
Clockmakers, 134
Clothes, mass-production of, 206
Clothing, ready-to-wear, 123

480

INDEX

Coal, beds, private monopoly of, 380
measures, 222
seams, opening up of, 157
smoke, 167
tar, 233
use of, 156
used by Chinese, 156
Cobalt, 232
Cobden, 189
Cohen, Morris, 237
Coke oven, by-product, 233
Coketown, 203
Collective symbols, 191
Collectivism, 281
Color, new importance of, 246
scientific researches on, 201
Committee, Hoover, 393
Commune, 111
Communication, 241
effect of paper upon, 136
instantaneous, 240
paradox of, 239
Communism, 403
Compensations, primitive, 300
Competition, 195
Competition, naval, 193
Complex, technical, 110
Comte, Auguste, 136, 219
Concentration, 162
Conceptual reorganization, 205
Conference, International Arms, 165
Conflict, 308

Congestion, losses from, 238
Conservation, 255, 430
Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, 32
Consumers, 93
organization of, 417
Consumption, 390
mass, by army, 93
new norms of, 422
normalization of, 398
Contraception, 260
Contraceptives, 175
Control, political, 417, 421
Conurbation, 163

Conversion, 375, 380
power, 401
Co-operation, 278
Copper, 229
Corbusier, Le, 352
Corporations, 421
Cort, Henry, 91, 164
Coster, 135
Coulton, 13

Counting, automatic, 231
Courtesan, importance of, 98
Cranes, 334

Crawford, M. D. C., 144, 475
Creation, 376, 378

Creative life, social nature of, 409
Crescograph, Bose’s, 254
Cross-hauls, 388
Crystal Palace, 155, 207
Cubists, 335
“Cultural lag,” 316
Cultural re-individuation, 294, 295
Culture, differentiation of, 107
regimentation of, 96
Curie, 246

Curves, aerodynamic, 253
Cutlery, Shejfield, 203
Czechoslovakia, 430

Daguerreotype, 338
Dances, erotic, 299
Danger, social, 367
Danzig, 144
Darby, Abraham, 156
Darby process, 164
Darmstaedter, 54, 437
Darwin, Charles, 186
Darwin, Erasmus, 138, 159
Data, primary, 370
Day-dreams, public, 315
Death, Cult of, 307
DeCaus, 159
Decline of the West, 265
Decoration, misuse of, 345
Defectives, 176
Deflation, 401

INDEX

481

DeForest, 218, 234

Deforestation, 72

De Gennes, 141

De Magnate, 221

Democracy, 178

De Morgan, 204

De Motu Animalium, 250

Denmark, 259, 388

Dentistry, 253

De-regionalization, 290

De Re Metallica, 65

Descartes, 41, 55, 131

Deutsches Museum, 57

Devaluation, social, 353

Devices, safety, 248

Dewey, Professor John, 423

Dickens, 204

Dickinson, Emily, 330

Diesel, 236

Diesel engine, 235

Dionysius of Syracuse, 86

Discourse on Method, 55

Discoveries, scientific, neotechnic, 214

Discovery, 60

Diseases, paleotechnic, 170
prevention of, 247
Disney, Walt, 341
Disruption, social, 42
Diversion of Energy, 377
Domesday Book, 114
Doughty, C. M., 204
Doulton Pottery Works, 200
Dreams, mechanical, 38
Dress, woman’s, 354
Drill, re-introduction of, 92
deterioration through, 94
Dualism, 249
Duchamp, Marcel, 351
Duchamp-Villon, 335
Dudley, Dud, 156
Duration, 16

Dwellings, worker’s standardized, 140
Dye industry, 194
Dynamic Equilibrium, 429
Dynamo, 221, 223

Earths, metallic, 231
Eckel, 157

Ecole Polytechnique, 219
Economic Man, 177, 269, 286
Economics, Victorian, 392
Economy, importance in machine art,
353

in production, 257
medieval, breakdown of, 99
new possibilities of, 388, 391
Edison, 218, 221, 251
Educator, 389
Efficiency, 432
Eiffel Tower, 208, 345, 351
Einstein, 369

Electric motor, introduction of, 224
effect on factory, 226
Electricity, 222
effects on industry, 225
organic production of, 255
transformation of environment by, 255
Electrification, 264
Electro-magnetic engine, 221
Elevator, 158
Emerson, 253, 330, 344
Empire, Roman, 379
Empiricism, Paleotechnic, 194
Energetics, social, 373
Energy, conquest of, 375
new sources of, 221, 222
non-organic, 117
primitive surplus of, 66
problem, 380
Engels, Friedrich, 187
Engine, atmospheric, 161
Newcomen, 160
steam pumping, 159
“water-commanding,” 160
Engineer, 219
automotive, 237
primitive, 77
Dutch, 116

Engineering, human, 413
England, 151, 389
backwardness of, 152
technical superiority of, 193

482

INDEX

Enyironment, destruction of, 169
equilibrium in, 430
insurgence against, 319
life-sustaining, 248
new machine, 356
simplification of the, 357
•will to dominate, 43
Eotechnic, 109

civilization, underlying unit of, 112
inventions, ignorance of, 141
Equality, 178
Equilibrium, 429-432
vital, 262
Erewhon, 284, 301
Escalator, 158
Essen, 192
Esthete, the, 346
Esthetic Compensation, 199
experience, new fact of, 333
new, 322
refinement, 359
spectacles, new, 325
Euler, 214
Euphonia, 251

European society, breakdown of, 153
Evelyn, Sir John, 81
Existence, struggle for, 185
Expanding wants, 104
Expansion, financial, 393
Expenditure, standard of, 178
Experimental method, 132
Exploitation, 157
industrial, 140
External world, 330
concentration on, 40
in Middle Ages, 29

Faber, 251

Factory design, neotechnic, 224
Factory, organization of, 176
origin of, 138
production, early, 89
Fallopius, 260

Fantasy, withdrawal into, 315
Farmer, tools of, 63

Fascism, 419

Faraday, Michael, 52, 214, 221, 331, 369
Faustus, Dr., 331
Fear, 42

exploitation of, 195
Feldhaus, Franz Marie, 158, 437
Felibrigistes, 291
Fifteenth Century, 408
Finality, 318
Finance, 24
cycle of, 76

Financial structure, 374
Fire, 79

Firearms, effect of, 87
Fisherman, 63
Flame-throwers, 310
Fleming valve, 234
Fletcher, J. G., 475
Flight, dream of, 37
Flint, importance of, 66
Flying machine, Leonardo’s, 140
Flying shuttle, 144
Fontana, Joannes, 22, 141
Food supply, 186
Foods, mass-distribution of, 206
Forceps, obstetrical, 206
Ford, Henry, 225, 226, 386
Foreign markets, struggle for, 190
Form, new interest in, 253
simplification of, 348
Forq, Nicholas, 134
Fourneyron, 118, 143, 213
Frank, Waldo, 343
Franklin, Benjamin, 43, 167
Freud, 248
Frey, Dagobert, 18
Frost, Robert, 371
Fugger, Jacob, 23
Fuggers, 75

Functionalism, Growth of, 344
Furnace, blast, 87, 139, 156
Cort’s reverberatory, 161
electric, 226
glass, 124

Future, machines of, 427

INDEX

Galileo, 48, 126, 214
Gambling, miner’s aptitude for, 67
Garden-cities, 264
Gardening, 332
Gas engine, 235
Gases, poison, 169, 310
Gauge, strain, 254
Gauguin, 204

Geddes, Professor Patrick, 109, 151,
163, 319, 370, 475
Geographer, 389
Gerbert, 13
Ghengis Kban, 308
Ghosts, 195

Gibbs, Willard, 219, 369
Gilbert, Dr. John, 138, 221
GlanviU, 58
Glass, 124
and ego, 128
as symbol, 125
colorless, 125
drinking, 352
in chemistry, 127
technics, 245
transparent, 128
Venetian, 124
Glass-making, 143
Gnomes, 73

God, as eternal clockmaker, 34
Gods, 326
Goethe, 331, 410
Gold, use of, 66
Goods life, 105
Goods, manufactured, 228
standardized, 92
Goodyear, 260
Grabo, 335
Gradgrind, 169
Great Eastern, 207
Green leaf reaction, 375
Greenwich time, 198
Grenades, hand, 310
Grimm, Brothers, 286
Grundtvig, Bishop, 293
Guericke, Otto von, 221

483

Guggenheim Foundation, John Simon,
475

Guild, supplanting of, 132, 143
Gun, machine-, 87
organ, 87
Guns, 310
Gutenberg, 135
Gymnastics, Victorian, 425
Gyroscope, 101

Haber, 257
Hahnemann, 248
Hairy Ape, The, 235
Hairy ape, 302
Halles des Bles, 164
Hamburg, 236, 334
Hancock, 193
Hand-crafts, 413
Handicraft art, 359
educational values of, 322
its survival, 348
modern, 347
Hand-weapon, 82
Harness, modern form of, 113
Harpagons, 393
Harvey, 138, 254
Heavenly City, 297
Helen of Troy, 245
Helicopter, 101
Helium, 232
Helmholtz, 252
Hemingway, Ernest, 243
Henderson, Fred, 227
Henderson, James L., 475
Henderson, Professor Lawrence J., 370
Henlein, Peter, 16
Henry, Joseph, 214
Hephaestus, 73
Herdsman, 62
Hero, 14

Hero’s Pneumatics, 159
Hertz, 218

High tension currents, 223
Highwayless Town, 237
HiU, David Octavius, 338
Hippocrates, 425

484

INDEX

History, overempliasis of, 293
Hobson, J. A., 142, 395, 397, 406
Hoffmann, 204
Holland, 148, 161, 259, 390
Hooke, Robert, 49, 57
Horsepower, 112
Horseshoe, iron, 112
Horticulture, 148
Hothouses, glass, 125
Hours, canonical, 13
House of Terror, 175
Housing acts, 192
Howard, Ebenezer, 370, 426
Hugo, Victor, 204, 289
Hull House, 347
Humanist movement, 407
Humanity, ideals of, 85
Hunter, 61
Huntsman, 134
Huntsman process, 164
Hussite Wars, 158

Icaria, 190

Ideals, acquisitive, 103
paleotechnic, 213
Ideology, 368
mechanical, 364
organic, 368
paleotechnic, 187
split in medieval, 44
Idolum, seventeenth century, 51
Imaginary Invalid, 425
Imperialism, 291, 302
Impersonality, 329
Improvement, mechanical, tempo of, 54
Income, fixed, 402
Increasing wants, dogma of, 392
India, 135

Industrial Age, Cathedrals of the, 209
Industrial discipline, foundation of, 173
Industrial Pioneer, 296
Industrial production, 416
Industrialism, achievements of, 324
Industrialists, missionary enthusiasm of,
54

Industries, chemical, 228
location of, 194
metallurgical, 222
Industry, backwardness of, 146
efficient, 379

functional organization of, 418
money-making capacities of, 392 '
neotechnic, efficiency of, 228
paleotechnic concentration of, 168
regional specialization of, 171
traditional, 391
Inefficiency, social, 276
Instinct of Workmanship, The, 272,
317

Institute, Stevens, 220
Institute of Technology, California, 220
Institutional life, mechanization of, 96
Instrumentalism, 274
Interest, potential change in, 427
Internal combustion engine, 235
International language, 294
Invention, 41, 132, 142, 438
accidental relation to utility, 54
Inventions, eotechnic, 141
important paleotechnic, 206
the primary, 131
social, 137
Inventors, 295
Seventeenth century, 58
Ireland, 388
Iridium, 231
Iron, 164

melting point of, 166
meteoric, 165
production, 206
bridge, 206
debt of, to wood, 120
dome, 164
I-heam of, 166
ship, 206
in war, 165

Ironwork, Renascence, 73
Isolation, 50

Italians, industrial leadership of, 138

INDEX

4^5

Jacobi, 218, 221
Jansen, Zacharias, 126
Japan, 134
Jews, culture of, 64
Jones, Bassett, 424
Jourdanne, 292
Jurgen, Johann, 144

Kandinsky, 336
Kapital, Das, 216
Kay, 144, 174
Kelly, William, 164
Kelvin, Lord, 208, 218
Kempelen, von, 251
Kepler, 25, 246
Killing, 94
Kipling, 55, 330

Knight’s Dictionary of the Mechanical
Arts, 252
Knitting, 145

Knowledge, scientific, paleotechnic in-
difference to, 194
Kodak, 352

Komensky, John Amos, 136
Korea, 135
Krannhals, 282
Kress, 251
Kropotkin, 259, 409
Krupp, 73, 95, 192

Labor, child, 248
division^of, 49

loss of bargaining power, 402
power, 146
saving, 147, 374
La Farge, John, 204, 346
Laissez-faire, 422
Lalique, 346, 354
Lamp, safety,' 68
Land Pioneer, 296
Land reclamation, 116
Land, socialization of, 381
Language, universal, 293
Languages, new, 294
Lantern, magic, 101

Lathe, 80

Maudslay’s screw-cutting, 209
Law of Octaves, 217
Lawrence, D. H., 300
Leaves of Grass, 409
Le Blanc, 90
Leeuwenhoek, 126, 245
Leger, 335, 336
Leibniz, 221
Leisure, 279, 379
Leisure Class, Theory of the, 96
Lenin, 264
Lens, convex, 126

Leonardo da Vinci, 30, 88, 139, 206.

250, 399, 407
Le Play, 359
Lewis, 210

Life, impoverishment of, 315
increasing care of, 248
Military, 97
simplification of, 94
starvation of, 178
Life values, 95, 311
imperviousness to, 95
Light, 200
and life, 245
cold, 255
electric arc, 221

Lightness, new standard of, 230
Limits, attempt to abolish, 104
on consumption, 394
Lippersheim, Johann, 126
Lister, 249, 260
Literature, vulgar, 315
Local languages, 290
Lollards, 188

Longitude, determination of, 121
Looking Backward, 403
Loom, 206
Louis XIV, 100
Loyalty, collective, 384
Liibeck, 333

Luxuries, necessary, 395
Luxury, private, 98
psychological ground for, 97

486

INDEX

Luxus and Kapitalismus, 102
Lynd, Robert, 397

Mach, Ernst, 369
Machine Age, 3

Machine Arts, cultivation of, 344
Machine, ambivalence of, 283
a minor organism, 11
as means of escape, 315
as Messiah, 45
as substitute religion, 53
attack on, 284
capacity to assimilate, 363
communism of, 354
definition of, 9
diminution of the, 423
dissolution of the, 364
esthetic perfection of, 349
esthetics of, 253
evaluation of, 282
expansion of, 391
fear of, 298
heresy to, 282
moral imperatives of, 355
permanent contribution of, 324
perversion of, 281
point of origin of, 12
preparation for, 60
promises of, 106
prospects of, 433
real significance of, 378
retreat from the, 269
tools, 205
wire-pulling, 115
worship of, 365
Machine-crafts, 413
Machine design, canons of, 351
Machine economy, the early, 188
Machine-herd, 410
Machinery, weaving, 142
Machines, destruction of, 284
displacing power of, 227
key, 120

limit of their development, 424
sole reality of, 51
unemployment of, 426

Maciver, R. M., 475
MacKaye, Benton, 237
Magic, 36-39

Magic Mountain, the, 220
Magnus, Albertus, 30
Mainz, 135
Male, Emile, 29
Malthus, Rev. T. R., 186
Mammon, 264
Man and Nature, 256
Manganese, 231, 232
Manliness, surrogate, 304
Mann, Thomas, 220
Manners, standardization of, 357
Mantoux, 143
Manu-facture, 145

Manufacture, interchangeable part, 90
Manufacturers, textile, 208
Manufacturing regulations, escape from,
143

Map, the Hereford, 21
Marchi, Francesco del, 141
Marconi, 218
Marey, E. J., 250
Marienkirche, 333
Market, primitive, 63
Marot, Helen, 412
Mars, 97

Marsh, George Perkins, 256
Marx, Karl, 23, 110, 114, 117, 146, 176,
187, 189, 191, 216, 234, 259, 403,
412

Mass-production, 100
military, 89

Mass production, egalitarian tendency,
392

Mass-sport, 303

Master pattern, importance of, 351
Matare, 229

Maudslay, Henry, 80, 209, 252
Maurice, Prince, 92
Material respect for, 336
Materialism, Purposeless, 273
Materials, neotechnic, 229
Matter and motion, 217
Mayer, Robert von, 138, 369

INDEX

487

Mayo, Professor Elton, 385
McCormick, 192
Measurement, 327
Mechanical faith, decay of, 366
Mechanical order, interpretation of, 334
Mechanical triumphs, unsoundness of,
53

Mechanics, as pattern of thought, 46
Mechanism, 216
Mechanization, 4

Mechanized society, tedium of, 310
Medicine, neotechnic, 247
Melville, 43, 204, 331
Metals, 68
rare, 231

Method, scientific, 328
Methodism, 284
Metropolitan Museum, 345
Mica, 232
Microscope, 334
Midas, curse of, 77
Middletown, 397
Migration, 297
Militarism, 87, 302
Military engineer, role of, 88
Mill, Albion Flour, 160
Mill, John Stuart, 205
MiU, water, 114
Miller, Oskar von, 475
Mills, horsepower of, 113
MiUtown, new, 153

Mine, as inorganic environment, 69, 70
Miners, German, 183
mortality rate among, 68
Miner’s Friend, 160
Mining, 61, 67, 68, 76
and warfare, 76
animus of, 158
as agent of capitalism, 75
devastation of, 72
primitive, 65

regions, backwardness of, 73
soil, 256
timber, 256
Mirrors, 128
Mistral, Frederic, 291

Mobility of labor, 195
Moby Dick, 331, 409
Moholy-Nagy, 335
Moliere, 425
Moloch, 264
Molybdenum, 232
Monarchs, absolute, 96, 326
Monastery, 111
regularity of, 13
Mondrian, 336
Monet, 245
Monopolies, 75
special, 132

Monopolistic sabotage, 404
Montage, 339
Morality, collective, 361
Morgan, William de, 346
Mormons, 297

Morris, William, 204, 209, 346, 347
Morse, 217, 221

Mortality tables, Massachusetts, 247

Motion Picture, 243, 341

Motion, rotary, 32

Motor car, 237

Motor, electric, 224

Movement, Romantic, 287

Muirs, 210

Mukerjee, Radhakamal, 377

Murano, 124

Murdock, 157

Murray, Henry A., Jr,, 475

Museum, 244

Music, 201

Muybridge, Edward, 251
Myres, J. L., 127
Myth, Victorian, 370
Myths, 331

Nanook of the North, 341
Napier, 121
Napoleon III, 91
Nasmyth, 174, 210

National Bureau of Standards, 265, 420
National hostilities, 233
National language, 294
National struggles, 213

INDEX

488

Nationalism, religion of, 263
Nature, 329
conquest of, 37
man’s attitude toward, 318
orderliness of, 133
return to, 295
Navigation, needs of, 121
Needlemaking machine, Leonardo’s,
140

Neolithic and neotechnic, parallel be-
tween, 430

Neolithic period, progress in, 37
Neotechnic, 109

Neotechnic civilization, special habitat
of, 238

Neotechnics, beginnings of, 212

Neutral world, 361

New England, 389

New esthetic terms, 350

New York, State of, 123, 381

Newcastle, 156

Newcomen, 160

Newland, 217

Nickel, 231

Nitrate beds, 257

Nitrogen, fixation of, 257

Nobel, 177

Non-profit making, 377
Numbers, romanticism of, 22
Niirnberg Chronicle, 36

Objectives, economic, 373
Occupations, primitive, 60
redifferentiation of, 64
Oersted, 214, 217
Ogburn, W. F,, 316, 437
Ohm, 214

Oliver, of Malmesbury, 22
O’Neill, Eugene, 235
Ophthalmoscope, 206
Orchestra, 202
Order, 364

neotechnic sense of, 217
new canon of, 329
Organic, displacement of, 52
elimination of, 47

Organic, new conception of, 370
reawakening of, 371
Organic whole, 425
Organic world, 252
Organization, factory, 90
mechanical, 275
of industry, stable, 420
Ornament, 252, 345
Oscillator, 234
Osier, 247
Otto, 235

Outlook Tower, 475
Overbeck, 204
Over-equipment, 377
Owen, Robert, 177, 370, 426
Ownership, 381
Oxford movement, 289

Painting, Gothic, 342
new technique of, 20
Palace, 103
Paleotechnic, 109
Art, 210

concepts, residue of, 155
environment, anti-vital nature of, 246
phase, 154

revolution, reaction against, 289
Palladio, 141
Paper, 137
Papin, 141, 160
Paracelsus, 138
Parachute, 140

Parasitism, elimination of, 405
Pare, Ambroise, 138
Parson, 235
Past, Cult of, 288
Pasteur, Louis, 218
Patents, 132
Pattern, eotechnic, 123
the social, of machine, 110
Peace, 183
Peasant, 62, 82, 205
Peasants’ War, 75
Pen, fountain, 110
goose-quill, 110
steel, 110

INDEX

489

Penaud, 251

Periodicity, meclianical, 197
Permanent Record, the new, 242
Personality, 274, 360
objective, 359, 362
projection of, 324
romantic, 362
Perspective, 20
Petroleum, 235
Pettigrew, J. B., 250
Phase rule, Adams’ application of, 155
Philo of Byzantium, 113
Photograph, 242, 337
Photography, 337
Physical sciences, method of, 46
Physics, dead world of, 369
Physiologist, studies of, 250
Physiology, 216, 425
Piano, 202
Picasso, 336
Pioneers, 296
Pittsburgh, 168
Place, Francis, 175, 260
Plan, 417
Planck, 369

Planned economy, 259, 404
Planner, regional, 389
Planners, community, 370
Planning, community, 367
industrial, 367
regional, 367
Platinum, 231
Plato, 241
Play, 303

spirit of, in eotechnic phase, 150
technical importance of, 101
Poe, 197

Polakov, Walter, 227, 384
Polarities, mechanical, 299
organic, 299
Polhem, 147
Political dictators, 302
organization, 417
power, struggle for, 190
Population, 186
decentralization of, 431

Population, equilibrium in, 431
Essay on, 186
planning of, 260
rising pressure of, 262
Populations, machine-trained, 362
Porcelain, 359
Porta, 159
Potemkin, S. S., 341
Potters, Chinese, 359
Poverty, duty to escape, 104
Power, 53, 196
doctrine of, 85
new sources of, 112
Superfluous, 273
increase of, 112
electric, 221
menace of, 366
pursuit of, 102
steam, 158
Power-machines, 14
14th century, 69
Power-utility, 11
Precision, in machine art, 352
the lathe as instrument of, 80
Price, 401
Primitive, the, 299
conditions, lure of, 298
Principle of economy, 353
Print, as new medium of intercourse,
136

Printing press, 134
steam-driven, 197
Private exploitation, 382
Process, division of, 146
organic, 249
Producer, 93

Production, aluminum, 230
basic, 415
copper, 230
mass, 90, 100

mechanical elements in, 383
overwhelming interest in, 102
regional, 388
timing of, 225
Professionalized skill, 306

INDEX

490

Profits, 374
theory of, 191, 192
Progress, doctrine of, 182
validity of, 184
Progress, 298
doctrine of, 182
Projectile, 82
Proletariat, 153
displacement of, 224
Promenade aerienne, 101
Prometheus, 37, 73
Protestantism, 42
Provence, 291
Pseudomorph, cultural, 265
the present, 263
Psychologist, 389
Psychosis, 286
Pullman cars, 345
Pumping engine, Watt’s, 156
Pumps, tide-mill, Peter Morice’s, 117
Pupin, 218
Puritanism, 103, 396
Pythagoras, 361

Qasim, Abu 1’, 22

Qualities, primary and secondary, 48
Quantities, minute, 248, 254
Quantity, respect for, 328
Quarrying and mining, 65

Rabelais, 100
Radiator, steam, 352
Radio, dangers of, 241
Radium, 232, 246
Railroad, 158, 162, 199
extension of, 163
Rails, iron-clad, 158
Rarity, 76

Rationalization of industry, 385
Rationing, need for, 382
Reaction, the romantic, 287
Reaping machine, 192
Rebuilding, Era of, 433
Reclamation, Zuyder Zee, 390
Reconstruction, intellectual, 372
Record-making, 305

Regimentation, 4, 41
social, 41, 241, 311
Regional balance, 431
Regionalism, economic, 387, 389, 431
new, 291

Regionalist, sentimental, 292
Regularity, 207, 269, 270
Rembrandt, 130
Renard, 62

Renascence, emptiness of, 44
culture, sterilization of, 288
Rennie, 161
Repeating pattern, 334
Replaceability, 277
Replacement, 397
Reproduction, mechanical, 343
Research, factual, 328
Resins, synthetic, 229
Resistance, to machine, 268
Retreat from machine, 299
Reuleaux, 80
Revival, “gothic,” 290
Revolution, 421
second industrial, 151
Reymond, DuBois-, 54
Ricardo, 216

Richards, Charles R., 475
Riedler, 351
Roberts, 164, 210
Robinson Crusoe, as ideal man, 42
Robinson, Geroid Tanquary, 475
Rockefeller, 177
Institute, 56
Roeblings, the, 351
Romantic, the, 285
Romantic protest, validity of the, 319
Romantics, 323

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 130, 182, 295
Routine, mechanical, 269
new bourgeois, 42
Royal Society, 25, 49, 57
Rubber, 193, 222, 232, 234
Rubbish heap, as destiny of machine,
196

Rudolph of Niirnberg, 115
Ruskin, John, 93, 205, 208, 259, 378

INDEX

491

Russell, Bertrand, 272
Russia, Soviet, 264, 403, 417

Sabinianus, Pope, 13
Sacrifice, tragic, 309
Sadler’s Factory Investigating Commis-
sion, 169

Salomon’s House, 56
Salvation, Imperialist, 195
Sanctorius, 128

Sanitation, paleotechnic lack of, 170

Savagery, 311

Savery, Thomas, 160

Sax, Adolph, 202

Saxophone, 202

Schefiel, von, 289

Schmidt, 73

Schools, Technical, 219
Schreber, 181
Schulz, 129
Schwenter, 58

Science and Medicine, History of, 408
and technics, 219
characteristics of, 47
concepts of, 217
continuity of, 205
general staff of, 57
importance of, 215
preparation for, 34
Victorian definition of, 321
Sciences, physical, 327, 367
social, 367

Scientific attitude, 331
economy, 404

knowledge, growth of, 408
method, 133
thought, 205

Scientist, new role of, 217
Scientists, England’s, 152
Scrap metal, importance of, 231
Screws, 209
Selectivity, 50
Self, isolation of, 130
Semper, Gottfried, 204
Senses, refinement of, 149
Serial operation, 280

Servile work, 414
Servility, 302
Sewage, atmospheric, 169
Sewage utilization, 257
Sewing machine, Thimoimet’s, 92
Sex, 180, 300
degradation of, 179
tabus on, 260
Shaftesbury, 192
Shaker Colonies, 297
Shakespeare, 98, 284
Shape, importance of, 252
Sharp & Roberts, 164
Shaw, 428

Ship, as rationalizing agent, 123
clipper sailing, 252
iron, 164

Shipbuilders, Glasgow, 208
Italian, 152
Ships, 120
of the line, 208
Shock-absorbers, 311, 316
Shuttle Clubs, 186
Siemens, Werner, 221
Siemens-Martin process, 165
Silk, artificial, 233
Simplification, 357
Singer, Charles, 126
Size, as symbol of eJBBciency, 162
Skill, castration of, 173
Skyscrapers, 208
Slavery, 278, 326
child, 193
Slaves, 41

Smiles, Samuel, 174, 330
Smith, Adam, 90, 121, 152, 403
Smithing, 69
Smoke, cost of, 168
wastage through, 169
Smoking pipe, 352
Snapshot, 338

Social intelligence, necessity for, 215
life, maturity of, 426
reactions, 268

Socialization of creative processes,
407

492

Societies, mechanical, 54
Society, dehumanization of, 302
Sociologist, 389
Soil, 257
regeneration, 257
Solar energy, present utilization of, 222
Soldier, self-esteem of, 95
Solingen, 203
Solvay, 193

Sombart, 23, 90, 105, 233, 371, 422
Song, workshop, 201
South Kensington Museum, 181, 204
Sowing machine, 192
Space and time, the itch to use, 22
in the Renascence, 342
new conception of, 20
Spallanzani, 127, 247
Spatial relations, in Middle Ages, 18
Specialism, 306
Specialization, regional, 171
Spectacle, mass in sport, 304, 306
Spectacles, 126
Spectroscope, 245
Speed, 237

Spencer, Herbert, 181, 187, 302, 429
Spengler, Oswald, 69, 108, 265, 365
Sperry, 218
Spingarn, J. E., 475
Spinning, 62, 144
wheel, 144

Spinoza, Benedict, 131
Spoon-wheel, 118, 213
Sport, 303, 307
Sports hero, 306
Standard of living, 395, 398
of perfection, the new, 358
qualitative, 147
time, 198
vital, 399

Standardization, 90, 278
premature, 386

Standardized production, beginnings
of, 90

Standards, 318
Stanford, Leland, 251

INDEX

Starvation, 181
discipline of, 173
Steam, 101
Steamboat, 158
Fitch’s, 161
Steam carriage, 163
Murdock’s, 161
Steam engine, 3, 158
Branca’s, 32

Watt’s improvement of, 160
as pacemaker, 162
Steam hammer, Nasmyth’s, 166
Steam locomotive, 158
Steam looms, 206
Steam pump. Watt’s, 156
Steamship, 207
first iron, 164
Steam turbine, 235
Steel, crucible, 164
Steinheil, 221

Sterilization, temporary, 260
Stethoscope, 206
Stevens, Alfred, 203
Institute, 220
Stieglitz, Alfred, 339, 340
Stifel, Michael, 35
Stream pollution, 170
Structure, esthetic, 371
Struggle, the class, 189
for existence, 180
Studies, time and motion, 385
Styles, Women’s, 98
Suburbia, 313
Subway, 333
Sullivan, 370
Sun, City of the, 58
Sunlight, importance of, 169
Surgery, modern, 249
Surgical cleanliness, 171
Surplus values, 263
Survival of the Fittest, 187
Switzerland, 197
Sylvester II, Pope, 13
Symbol, 332

Syncretism, technical, 107
Synthesis, intellectual, 372

INDEX

493

Synthetic ammonia process, 257
System, mechanical, 47, 327
price, 401

Tam O’Shanter, 290
Tanks, 310
Tantalum, 231
Tate Gallery, 200
Taylor, Frederick, 258, 385, 386
Technical advance, similar resistance
to, 95

Technical co-ordination, 372
Technical schools, 219
Technics, glass, 128
modern, 111
relation to science, 52
tradition of, 321
virtuosity in, 55
Technological complex, 109, 155
Technological improvement, 174
Technological tenuousness, 416
Technological suicide, 233
Technology, world-wide basis of mod-
ern, 232

Telegraph, 199, 221
semaphore, 89
Telephone, 251
automatic, 194
Telescope, 126
Telford, 207
Tempo, 198
change of, 432
Tennyson, 330
Tesla, Nikola, 221

Textile industries, eotechnic improve-
ments in, 144

paleotechnic developments, 206
Textile plant, 228
Theleme, Abbey of, 100
Theophrastus, 156
Theory of Business Enterprise, 266
Thermometer, 128
Thomas, Dorothy S., 437
Thomson, J. Arthur, 475
Thonet process, 111

Thoreau, 204, 330, 400
Thorium, 232
Thorndike, Lynn, 39, 408
Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, The, 19
Three R’s, 137
Threshing machine, 192
Time, 196
abstract, 17
co-ordination, 272
in business, 42
in the Renascence, 342
mechanical, 16, 271
standardization of, 198
Time-keeping, 270
Time Machine, The, 414
Tokio, 233
Tolstoy, 204
Tool, 10

slow perfection of, 66
Tools and machines, difference be-
tween, 10

Toolmakers, English, 209
Tournay, 333
Town, Ithiel, 120
Town and country, 259
Townless Highway, 237
Toys, 101
Trade, 190

Tragedy of Waste, The, 275
Transition, 396
Transmission, telephone, 424
Transport, water, 121
Transportation, railroad, 198, 199
automobile, 236

and population distribution, 238
Treves, Sir Frederick, 171
Triumphs, Mechanical, 205
Troy, Helen of, 245
Tryon, 157

Tucker, John, Jr., 475
Tuckerman, 254
Turner, J. W. M., 200, 330
Turnover, labor, 384
Tungsten, 232
Type-forms, 348

494

INDEX

Ucelloj Paolo, 20
Uniformity, 277
Uniforms, 92
Universe, mechanical, 45
University, the, 137
Uranium, 232

Ure, Andrew, 168, 173, 190, 191, 270
Usher, 114, 134, 144
Usury, restriction of, 99
Utensils, 11

Utilitarian, the, 285, 346, 400
Utilities, 11, 63, 356

Valley-section, 60, 63
Valliere, Madame de la, lOO
Valorization, 406
Value, miner’s notion of, 77
Values, new cultural, 321
Vanadium, 231
Van Gogh, 200

Van Loon, Dr. H. W., 122, 475
Van Nelle factory, 350
Vauban, 88

Veblen, Thorstein, 25, 55, 96, 266, 284,
317, 354, 366, 401, 475
Vehicles, 206
Venice, 122
Venus, 97

Vermeyden, Cornelius, 117
Vestibule car, 199
Villes tentaculaires, 414
Visible Speech, Bell’s, 244
Vital norm, 398
Vital wants, 395
Vitruvius, 114
Volta, 214
Von Kempelen, 251
Vulcanite, 229

Wages, in competition with machine,
154

iron law of, 154
Wants, increasing, 393
Walden, 409
Walker, the, 371
Wallace, Alfred, 186

Wandering Scholars, The, 19
Wants, vital, 394
War, as aid to industrialism, 84
as mass drama, 309
constant improvements in, 83
progressiveness of, 89
American Civil, 165, 193
Franco-Prussian, 165
World, 165

War of the Worlds, The, 423
Wardom, 195

Warfare, as agent of dissociation, 107
and Invention, 85
horrors of, 87
instruments of, 83
mechanized, 93, 318
Warship, steelclad, 165
Waste, 277

Waste in Industry, Hoover Committee
on the Elimination of, 377
Watch, cheap standardized, 17
Watches, as symbol of success, 16
Waterbury, 197
Water-mill, 14
eotechnic, 114
in mining, 115
Water-power, 147, 222, 223
Water routes, 121
Water-turbine, 213, 222, 424
Water-power, 222, 223
Watt, James, 3, 168, 186, 209
Wealth, Ruskin’s definition of, 378
Weaving, improvements in, 144
origin of, 62
paleotechnic, 206
Weber, Max, 22, 391
Weis, C. L., 475
Wells, H. G., 330, 414, 423, 433
Welsbach, 157
Weltbild, mechanical, 46
Wesley, 284

Western civilization, present state of,
429

Westinghouse plant, 385
Wheel, 31, 80

INDEX

495

'Wheel-and-axle, 80
Wheels, water, 113
Whistler, 200

Whitehead, A. N., 12, 34, 331, 358, 368

Whitman, 331, 340

Whitney, Eli, 90

Whitworth, 210

Wilkinson, 160

Will-to-order, 3

Windmill, industrial value of, 115
power of, 117
Windmills, Dutch, 117
Windpower, 115
Wisconsin, 259
Wohler, 233

Wood, importance of, 77, 78
uses of, 119
Woodman, 62, 79
Woolwich Arsenal, 209
Worcester, Marquis of, 159
World, early mechanical, 372
World-picture, the mechanical, 368
World War, 194
World Exposition, 155
Work, 150, 177, 379, 411

Worker, degradation of the, 172
free, 75
neotechnic, 227
paleotechnic, 188
psychological relations of, 385
handicraft, 172
Workers, 418
Working day, 176
Works, Cadbury Cocoa, 384
Dennison paper manufacturing, 384
Godin steel, 384
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 347, 370
Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 251
Wyatt, 174

Wyck, Heinrich von, 14

X-ray, 249
X-ray tube, 245

Young, Thomas, 138

Zimmerman, 234
Zimmern, Alfred, 280
Zola, 204
Zurich, 219
Zuyder Zee, 161

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